Babau

*50 copies limited edition.* “All The Gurls Were At The Women’s Archo Ashinto” is the new work by post-exoticist duo Babau, a project of Matteo Pennesi and Luigi Monteanni, both founders of Artetetra, a label and platform pursuing practice-based sound research on digital folklore and internet world music, which they term Quinto Mondo; a spin on Jon Hassel’s Fourth World. After releasing their own output on labels such as Discrepant, Communion and Artetetra and being selected as SHAPE+ alumni 2022/23, Babau is back on Bamboo Shows with a wild ride into the soundscapes of bootleg sound ethnography and floating world digi-exotica collages.

As part of the “Vai a casa, sei ubriaco!” series, Babau redraws the lines of stoner-impressionism and gonzo traveling through the rework of a radio show they produced for Psychic Radio. Born as a patchwork of imaginative sketches meshing YouTube audio manipulation with Babau’s signature live computer techniques, spirit box-like vocal excerpts and irregularly pulsing beats, “ATGWATWAA” explores the brain fog of transglobal exoticism offering a continuous, fake field recording where organologies and aural timbres conjure a floating world of sound flows and yet-to-come folk genres from yonder. If you’re here for a first-class ticket to mind trickery and surreally tender ‘cinema pour l’oreille’, no one does it better.

In particular, the title of the album comes from a shirt photographed by Babau in the streets which belongs to the phenomenon of SHANZAI clothing. Shanzhai (Chinese: 山寨; pinyin: shānzhài; Cantonese Jyutping: saan zaai) is a Chinese term literally meaning ‘mountain fortress’, the places where smugglers, rogues and thieves were imagined to reside, whose contemporary usage encompasses counterfeit, imitation, or parody products and events, as well as the subculture surrounding them. The term’s modern usage increased about 2008, when shanzhai smartphones achieved their peak domestic popularity.

Today, people associate the phrase with grassroots invention and ingenuity, rather than with deception or imitation. Similarly, Babau’s sonic vignettes talk of naive inconsistent societies and bootleg archipelagos, knock-off folk music and smuggled fragments of musics quilted into a feverish pseudo-regional repertoire. With “ATGWATWAA”, Babau coagulates its sonic weapons and tricks into a new narration leading the listeners to emerging landscapes and disappearing worlds made of magic pressurized air. 
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