Review: Babe, Terror – Horizogon

BANDCAMP.

Horizogon feels like standing in a hallway between various open doors, absorbing the sounds of separate lives as a happenstance symphony. A warped vinyl of sombre choral music spills out from one room. Pastoral orchestral tones seep out of another. A jazz group practice tentatively down the hall. Synthesisers stud the soup like sequins, while knocks and creaks appear at the edges like residents scuttling across the floor above. Even though their combination is a collision of different energies and melodic keys, it’s not just forceful proximity that gives them their affinity. These disparate musics converge upon a shared mood; a certain melancholic fatigue; a bleary-headed sickness. Superficially – say, on the level of the traditionally “harmonious” – these spaces and voices seem detached from one another. Yet there’s a connection occurring somewhere, running deeper than the level of language. There’s ultimately a heartbreak in how these textures operate both in kinship and isolation, all bound together and yet seemingly oblivious to their shared affliction.

I’m made to feel like a sleepwalker shuffling through these pieces: no beginnings, no endings, no distinct sections, no crescendos. Even the distinction between each track feels tenuous, with each better understood as traversing the same space at a different moment in time. The orchestra might strike upon different refrains – horns in mournful swirls, strings in bird-flock ascents – but the experience is consistently characterised by that fogged, faded sorrow. It’s a record that yearns to be looped indefinitely, unravelling the outline of its duration so that all becomes enveloped in mist, submitting time itself to the drear of shapelessness.