BABYLON
(Old Europa Cafe, 2002)
 


1. When in the Height Heaven was not named
2. Los dos reyes y los dos laberintos (Alamut)
3. Playing with the fire
4. La cittá invisibile (Pentesilea)
5. Habla Garmin
6. Etemenenanki (Babel)
7. Praying under the neon lights of Babylon

Download full album from The Internet Archive.
Play and download individual tracks at The Internet Archive or Last.fm

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Old Europa Cafe website: www.oldeuropacafe.com
Artwork: Ricardo Marichal (www.hablagarmin.com)
Special Guests: Vocals on 1 & 2 by Audreane; Vocals on 4 by Francesco Banchini; German vocals on 5 by Pilori; Arab vocals on 7 by Aasef Mreich; Double bass and flute on 7 by Hararca.


This was crazy stuff. I was living in a dump, working night shifts, and I basically fucked up my sleep cycles, so I felt quite estranged from the normal world. I was awake when everyone else was asleep, so I only had a few hours a day to do "mundane" stuff like shopping, meeting friends or dealing with banks. The rest of the time I was alone, working on this. I would arrive home from work at 7:30 AM, pour a vodka or two, work on EQ, sequencing and structure until noon, go to sleep, wake at 20:00, work again on the tracks until 23:00, leave for work, rinse and repeat. I sometimes forgot about things like "eating".

All this gave me a very strange perspective on life and the city, and this perspective was what I tried to convey in the album: the feeling of discovering something new hidden beneath the everyday routine, beneath everything we take for granted. I didn't feel I was really living in the same city as the people who went to work at the same time I was going to sleep; I felt like I was living not outside, but a step aside.

I used a hell of a LOT of home-made samples on this one. I would record the weirdest sounds just for the sake of it, just because everything seemed to make so much sense when put together. Mics inside of water bottles, static electricity, real guitars, double bass and flute, scraping metal, breathing sounds, construction noises... Inspiration went really wild here; that's the real reason I love this record so much, because here I really lost the fear to experiment with whatever crossed my thought: I had learnt and improved, I had the equipment I needed and all the time in the world to work on it. What more could I ask for? A stounding artwork? Check. A label like Old Europa Cafe releasing it? Check. Playing support act for Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio? Check.

This was the Perfect Moment. My milestone. And from here onwards, things start getting strange again. Move on to "Rebis" for a bit of contemporary history...