BABILS – the joint between

(CD, still)

The lose collective from Belgium called Babils is interested mainly in what is hidden in the empty space between the safe points. This is just an assumption but it seems as if they started off from a winding centrepoint and then would add new layers, new instruments, new ideas from there, with open ears and minds to changes and shifts, but with the willingness to blow up a heavy and dense storm of rhythms, bass heavy noise and improvised blowing. They dwell in the hypnotic effect of looped rhythms but also bathe in more gentle ambient noise collages that are more extreme to the ears than the tribal pounding but interestingly also more soothing and relaxing. Do I have to connect to Can once again? Their approach is going paralell to that of The Skull Defekts, but is more open and freer in its basic strategy and execution. Where rhythm stay put fixedly for the whole song, with guitars and other stuff adding dynamic shift shapers, the Babils are willing to turn the song on, off or around at any given moment in time, if it seems fit, changing the rhythm, the dynamic, the timing, etc.

What you can’t gather from the description of the music in this review up to now is the intensity and energy with which the members of Babils try to blow you away. These tracks, for all their jazziness (in the broadest sense) and free improv-appeal and psychedlic influences are posessed by a dense heaviness and power. Track number four, interestingly titles “2 = 3”, is settled deeply in the centre of noise rock. The trumpets and whirlwinds of noise layered in the back are a unique addition in this context, but they work. Maybe this mixture makes Babils too jazzy for the noise rock crowd and too dirty for the jazz crowd, but refer to the title and the predilection of Babils to sit themselves down comfortably between any given seats. Moreover there is an elephant, or rather the doublehead of a mirrored elephant on the cover, now that should be signifyer enough for you to catch the drift.

The main question regarding this kind of heavy psychedelic music – for that is probably what it boils down in the most central degree: a headtrip record – is where does it lead us to? If you believe in one of the various kinds of discussed universal energies that connect all living beings and want to explore fields in your mind further out than you have ever been, you might find this record helpful (plus either a helping of your drug of choice or a big dose of realism to shake you awake… ah, nevermind) but what next and where to then. The Babils believe in something they call Mellaerts Pedagogy, which I have never heard of but I guess it boils down to a set of rules that help to overcome the set of rules. And summing up we can say that it is one heavy trip. Even the field recordings mixed into the songs and all the other additions and the drugs that we found under the bed of our roommate a week after he checked out.