Original release at:
zpellhologos.bandcamp.com/album/birmania

Basic information before the detailed text: This album was written, composed and produced by me in 2021, primarily as a soundtrack for my second feature film. It's a work that follows some ideas of Horizogon, released a year before, but in more raw, forestry and simple fashion, with piano and synths, and orchestras in one track only I think. I really liked how it turned out, and that's why I had this idea of launching a new moniker to house this work. I love the idea of returning to release more cinematic stuff like Zpell Hologos in the future. Just as I like the idea of creating a total exchange between these two projects, moving to here, my main bandcamp, these works after a while. You can listen and buy all the album here. Including a bonus, as is my tradition to offer, Mong Tohn. I also have the tradition of hide some of best tracks, offering for the fans who buy the albums.

This album, "Birmania", has 6 (six) tracks, and 1 (one) 11 mins bonus track exclusive for Bandcamp buyers. Bonus comes from the very same process from which this album come and in which has been built.

More about Zpell Hologos: Zpell Hologos is Babe, Terror, and Babe, Terror is Claudio Katz Szynkier.

Some coverage the album is receiving:

www.latempestad.mx/silencio-selectivo-musica-ambient/ [La Tempestad]
twitter.com/notaspradiscos/status/1445793144814006280 [Bandcamp New And Notable -- don't have the exact link]
www.radioaktiv.it/zpell-hologos-birmania/ [Radio Aktiv]
brainwashed.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12819:zpell-hologos-qbirmaniaq&catid=50:sound-bytes&Itemid=140 [on the Great Brainwashed]
www.bedroomdisco.de/2021/10/zpell-hologos-birmania/ [Bedroom Disco]
www.onthefringesofsound.com/post/rounding-the-fringes-october-18 [On The Fridges Of Sound]
petalmotel.com/music-to-breathe-to/ [Petal Motel]
www.mixcloud.com/camp_fr/obladada-soniko-07th-january-2022/?fbclid=IwAR3ApajjLE_WGdOR-UmnKEFnCinR65bCTIPY288W3xkeYXMy6D5tHnawmes [Obladada]
ruc.pt/podcast/dissolucoes/dissolucoes-68-27-02-2022 [Coimbra University Radio - Dissoluções]

Original text:

"Birmania" is the debut album of the Brazilian musical project Zpell Hologos, and was scheduled for worldwide release on October 4th, 2021.

The album was conceived throughout 2021, an unforgettable year for Brazilians: the country became the world epicenter of the Covid19 pandemic, and its soul became disputed every day, in all spaces. The authoritarian militias, with a national project that seeks to de-democratize and implode the modern constitution ratified in 1988 ("The Citizens Book"), are approaching a final offensive, while the minority resistance takes to the streets for vocal and symbolic confrontation.

Amidst this climate, including lockdowns never very effective and arson attacks on the forests, the film "The Princess of Rangoon" emerged, a mysterious narrative journey through distant times and countries. The film is also a music album, "Birmania", and both stand as a sentimental return to the past. "Not to the past of a country without laws and colonized by explorers, the Brazil of the 1600s so obsessively imagined and idealized by oligarchs, deforesters and landowners who captured since 2016 a big part of the nation, but to a land of technological and naturalistic dreams, a place colonized by a phantom nostalgia, inhabited by magical fauna and flora", enlightens the author of the project Zpell Hologos.

"In terms of music, it's a writting proposal with muffled, sketched synths, orchestras and pianos, but with a tender, warm and radiant feeling too. It is, I think, evocative of animals-- elements of great strength and inspiration. It's a kind of a hunt in search of a lost civilization, which is also a civilization of the future, which takes place with the help of these mystical and somehow redemptive forms of fauna, and with their correspondent musical ambiences. From that, came a film and an album", says Claudio Szynkier, author of both the "Birmania" album and the film "The Princess of Rangoon" (to be released later in 2023). "Birmania" comes with 6 videos whose image source is Szynkier's own film. "I have a chronic ear problem, which had a phase of stability, and then I decided to take the opportunity to dive into music again, but with a different outfit."

Zpell Hologos is the new incarnation of this adored Brazilian artist, Claudio Szynkier. Szynkier has a history as Babe, Terror that reached its peak in 2020, with the album "Horigozon", a milestone in experimental music of that year. Pitchfork and Guardian, which chose "Horizogon" as one of the best global albums of the year, were some of the vehicles to recognize the depth of Szynkier's work. Links: www.theguardian.com/music/2020/dec/23/the-10-best-global-albums-of-2020
pitchfork.com/features/overtones/climate-change-music/
babeterror.bandcamp.com/album/horizogon-2020

"We are at the end of something and the beginning of something else. There are the militias gaining power, making Covid19 to be permanent, and there are voices coming from the streets and from the forests, indians. It is a moment of anguish, torment and expectation. And I think that the new form of the world and of what is called Brazil is always where we haven't looked properly yet. There is a kind of a portal that connects the Brazilian rainforest and the Atlantic forest to the equatorial south of the Central African Republic, Gabon, and also to Southeast Asia, Polynesia, Myanmar, Thailand. They are all phisically similar. I kind of discovered this portal, this crack, this old door with open cracks for third-world transnational adventures. And I made the music of this thing, this meeting avenue, this bond".

No accident Brazil and Myanmar, for example, go through the same historical moment: far right sinister militia. In the brazilian case, a return to feudalism versus democratic constitution & openness to the libertarian journeys propitiated by art. From the idea of that portal came this album "Birmania", the film "The Princess of Rangoon" as well, the videos that are nothing but fragments of the film too. And this work when you put together is, like "Horizogon", which I made as Babe, Terror, a proposal for a redeeming and as-yet-unthought-out future", reveals the utopian Szynkier.

"Birmania" comes out worldwidely on Zpell Hologos Bandcamp.

(piece written in June 2021 by Joana Santos).