Babau

𝘾𝙝𝙞𝙢𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙘, 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙟𝙖𝙯𝙯 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙚𝙡𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙞𝙘𝙖 𝙩𝙞𝙥𝙥𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙤 𝙛𝙖𝙣𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙍𝙞𝙘𝙝𝙖𝙧𝙙 𝙃𝙖𝙮𝙢𝙖𝙣 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝘽𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙠 𝘿𝙞𝙘𝙚, 𝙆𝙤𝙧𝙡𝙖 𝙋𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙞𝙩 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙎𝙪𝙣 𝘼𝙧𝙖𝙬, 𝙏𝙤𝙣𝙮 𝙎𝙘𝙤𝙩𝙩 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙡 𝙎𝙩𝙤𝙣𝙚.

"The Sludge Of The Land is the new album by digital folklore and post-exoticism Italian duo Babau. Their first full length since 2023’s Flatland Explorations Vol. 2, with The Sludge Of The Land Babau lands on Impatience with their signature audio-prestidigitation at it’s most disorientingly pungent and zonked, a uniquely contemporary approach described as the sound of a continent moving; animals, plants and minerals included.

As part of a residency at Casa degli Artisti, Milan, in 2022, Babau turned their atelier into a recording studio and performing venue thanks to Francesco Piro, who produced the entirety of the album. There, the duo improvised with different acoustic and digital instruments for several hours a day. Returning after ten years to a sound more akin to a band or small orchestra, Babau re-explores tropes and themes of exotica and jazz from their unique and off-kilter perspective of terminally-online diggers-dwellers of the internet flatland.

An homage to digital content consumption and dopamine-infused sensory overloads, The Sludge Of The Land imagines itself as an abstract sonic wunderkammer of online detritus. By diving into the world of ‘sludge content’: audiovisual chaos produced by mixing different content using split screens or dizzying patchworks of videos, Babau celebrates the formless, viscous goo, spam, chum and slop of out-of-context moving image, fast paced digital videos and lo-fi mp4 artifacts. By endlessly spiraling into the non-spaces of The Net, Babau explore the uncharted parageographies of lavacasts, mysterious Chinese anthropozoomorphic legendary beings, vampiric doomscrolling glides and doppelganger, ctrl+c & ctrl+v spiritualism. These ghosts of pointless microevents and traveling-without-moving bedroom boredom are stuffed by Babau with the epic tone and compositional approach of exotica and world music 2.0 reveries, resulting in an absurd, playful narrative of the dangers and allures of the web.

Bringing together the sound of Richard Hayman and Black Dice, Korla Pandit and Sun Araw, Tony Scott and Carl Stone, once again the duo crafts a compelling audio-textual hallucination of transglobal chimera. A multi-fi, extremely layered treasure of fifth world music."