In 1957, nearly seven decades before Babau’s new “post-exoticism” album The Sludge of the Land, bandleader Martin Denny released an album called Exotica. At a time when the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom was still in living memory, the NYC-born composer and his band were under contract with “tiki culture” maven Don the Beachcomber at a Hilton hotel in Honolulu, where they’d developed a style of easy-listening music that incorporated animal sounds, Latin pop influences, and a mish-mash of traditional instruments like shamisen and gamelan from Asia and Polynesia. The new sound became a global fad, even in the locales that exotica artists fantasized about. The Japanese band Yellow Magic Orchestra, who pioneered the use of sampling in popular music and presaged hip-hop and techno, covered Denny’s “Firecracker” with a futuristic 1978 synth-pop interpretation that delights in the song’s catchy appeal while subverting its chintzy orientalism.
Fast forward to 2025, and these tactics of recombination and pastiche have become well-established in experimental music, as artists reframe the odds and ends of the past and present through contemporary insight. As Babau, duo Luigi Monteanni and Matteo Pennesi have navigated these post-tradition traditions for over a decade, going back to their roots in the cassette label boom, and they’ve helped to distribute like-minded music through their own label Artetetra and monthly Milan residency Future Pidgin, which has hosted everyone from Carl Stone to Foodman. (They’ve done academic work, too, about “transglobal sonic subcultures.”) Their latest album, The Sludge of the Land, promises to unsettle your sensibilities by exploring the churning zone of kitsch that lurks behind more respectable musical forms. Confronted with an album like this, you wonder: How do you develop a unique perspective with a view from nowhere? Once you’ve mashed up detritus from all over the map, what new things can you do with it? Babau’s reply: Just keep on mashing.
The breadth of Babau’s sound is impressive at a glance, even in a world where labels like Hausu Mountain offer plenty of rowdy digital improv. “The sound of a continent moving…” establishes an exaggerated sense of scale with muscular percussion: Toy keyboard plinks and saxophone squawks spiral over a booming racket of drums in the ether, slyly threatening to collapse, like an elaborate plate-spinning act. There are tracks that scrape down in the mire of exotica, too, like the swampy psychedelia on “As long as blue hours unravel…”, where the cartoonish cricket chirps sound almost as big as the track’s obnoxious snake charmer wind melody. Just as Babau borrow gimmicks from old exotica and library music, they incorporate tools from experimental music that’ll be recognizable to any regular Boomkat consumer. The bag of tricks–Ikue Mori sample-trigger rituals, Orange Milk-adjacent MIDI choir theatrics, Valentina Magaletti kitchen-sink drum thwacking, dubby Sun Araw haze–is endless, but cohesive.
The barrage of sounds and effects is so overstimulating that trying to suss out whatever occasional folk signifiers peek through (a gamelan here, a pan-flute there) can leave you with egg on your face. The effect is like emptying your phone’s storage, or a rapid scroll through the “sound test” feature on an old Nintendo game—the individual motifs are already abstracted from their origins, so riffling through them all at once is doubly disorienting. Producer Francesco Piro mixes the album with an ear for the alien and otherworldly so that none of the sounds feel like they were played by a few guys in a room. It’s not as sterile as albums with a more explicit focus on stock digital sounds, but in comparison to something clearly rooted in the DIY noise tradition like Moth Cock, or younger artists fully fried by the social internet, Babau’s practice sounds a bit placeless. Spend enough time with the album, though, and you might admire its carefully-maintained climate, like that of a stoned digital greenhouse.
The album’s maximalist approach, combining an array of live instruments, VSTs, and samplers, sometimes coheres into true jams. Often, though, the clutter is the point, and you’re smacked with temperamental textures that channel the flippant streak of plunderphonics. The title of “Wunderkammer Unbound” refers, in German, to the “cabinet of curiosities” in Renaissance European households that predated modern museums, and the track makes good on this premise by scattering a roomful of organic and mechanical sounds into misfit dioramas; in the commotion, a chirping bird gets artificially pitched up into an extended vamp, as if it forgets it’s an animal and not a machine. “When we fell into the eternal glide…” interrupts its click-and-drag noodling with cryptic, paranoid vocals that groan like a millennial Mark Stewart. The most satisfying moments come when all the chaotic ephemera disperses to make space for shimmering, ambient chords. These melodic figures recall Jon Hassell’s blissful “fourth world” projects and the heady early days of computer music. The Sludge of the Land attempts to break new ground by retreading pathways that have, over the years, become intuitive, and Babau harness a sense of possibility that’s almost quaint. They capture the pleasure of learning how to muck around with whatever tools fascinate you, calling back to previous artists who’ve done the same with their own fraught collisions of technology and fantasy. It’s a well-produced, well-executed mess.
