Babau: The Toxic Sludge Threatening Our Land
▼ Summary
– In 1957, Martin Denny created the “Exotica” genre, a style of easy-listening music blending animal sounds, Latin pop, and traditional Asian and Polynesian instruments.
– The Japanese band Yellow Magic Orchestra later subverted Denny’s “orientalist” style with a futuristic 1978 synth-pop cover of his song “Firecracker.”
– The experimental duo Babau, active since the cassette label boom, continues this tradition of musical recombination and pastiche in albums like 2025’s *The Sludge of the Land*.
– Babau’s album explores the “kitsch” behind respectable music, using a vast array of sounds from old exotica to modern experimental tools to create a cohesive, unsettling mix.
– Their work demonstrates that after mashing up global musical detritus, the creative response is to continue refining and recombining these elements.
The musical landscape of today thrives on the art of creative recombination, where artists skillfully blend disparate sounds and historical references into something entirely new. Babau, the Italian duo of Luigi Monteanni and Matteo Pennesi, stands at the forefront of this experimental approach. Their latest work, The Sludge of the Land, directly engages with the legacy of exotica, a mid-century genre popularized by figures like Martin Denny, which repackaged sounds from Asia and Polynesia into a kitschy, easy-listening format. Babau doesn’t merely revisit this history; they submerge it in a churning, contemporary digital sludge, asking what new meaning can be extracted from the cultural debris of the past.
Their method involves a relentless, joyful mash-up. The album’s opening track, “The sound of a continent moving…,” immediately sets a vast, unstable scene with thunderous percussion. Toy-like keyboard notes and frantic saxophone lines weave through the booming rhythm, creating a tense balance that feels both monumental and on the verge of collapse. Other pieces, such as “As long as blue hours unravel…,” dive deep into a psychedelic swamp of exotica’s familiar tropes. Here, exaggerated cricket chirps compete with a garish, winding melody reminiscent of a snake charmer’s tune, amplifying the original genre’s cartoonish qualities to an almost absurd degree.
Babau’s toolkit is remarkably expansive yet coherent. They freely borrow the gimmicky sound effects and instrumental colors from vintage library music and exotica records. Simultaneously, they integrate techniques from modern experimental electronic music that will feel familiar to avid listeners of labels like Boomkat. Their sound collages incorporate the sample-triggering rituals of artists like Ikue Mori, the theatrical MIDI choir aesthetics associated with Orange Milk, the versatile percussion of Valentina Magaletti, and the hazy, dub-influenced atmospheres of acts like Sun Araw. This isn’t a chaotic free-for-all; it’s a deliberate and focused synthesis.
For over a decade, through their label Artetetra and their Milan event series Future Pidgin, Monteanni and Pennesi have cultivated a space for this kind of transglobal sonic exploration. Their academic work on “transglobal sonic subcultures” informs a practice that is both intellectually grounded and viscerally engaging. The Sludge of the Land effectively dismantles the perceived boundaries between high art and lowbrow kitsch, between historical artifact and contemporary noise. In a world saturated with digital pastiche, Babau’s answer to the question of originality is simple and potent: continue the process of recombination with greater intensity and insight, transforming the sludge into a compelling new form of expression.
(Source: Pitch Fork)