Years in the making, the Original Soundtrack to Postcards from Babylon is a unique piece of 21st-century storytelling. Weaving together Alex Forster’s evocative music and Christian de Sousa’s spoken-word narratives, it takes us on a visceral journey through the physical and virtual landscapes of capitalist civilisation, searching for understanding, change and liberation.

This is a double-album, containing the full 55minute journey in both spoken-word and instrumental versions, along with individual files of all the tracks in both the narrative and instrumental versions.

Listening Guide:
For maximum effect, listen to PfB as you would watch a movie - uninterrupted and in a darkened room. Use the continuous mix and play through good speakers or headphones.

Synopsis:
We travel into the techno systems of international finance and bear witness to its global effects. We hit the dancefloor with the ecstasy generation, and move out to the streets with the anti-capitalist movement. From a City trader to a Kurdish refugee, we meet characters living at opposite ends of the economic spectrum and trying to figure out their situations. The journey takes us to Japan to learn meditation from a Zen monk and to the English countryside to join a community of conscious dancers. Breaking out of the city and dreaming into the lucid rhythms of nature, we explore ways that creative subcultures resist the system and trace alternative pathways for the future.

Postcards from Babylon is a meditation on life, death and civilisation at the turn of the second millennium. Alex’s rich, diverse compositions and soundscapes span from the electronic to the acoustic, creating an immersive world into which Christian’s storytelling invites our cinematic imaginations, and calls for engaged reflection on our times.

Track-listing:
1. PfB Continuous Mix
2. Welcome to the Metropolis
3. Exiles
4. Find Your Own / We Got Love
5. Ideas for Sale
6. Removing the Mask
7. Reclaim the Streets!
8. The Lines of our Minds
9. The Ancient Way
10. The Way of the Dancer
11. Ceremony
12. The Web of Life
13. Grandfather
14. Civilisation


The PfB Story:
Postcards from Babylon is a conversation about the state of the world and the search for individual and collective freedom. Originally a book of photography and writing by Christian de Sousa, it evolved into a multimedia experiment, spawning a micro-festival, exhibitions, postcard-writing invitations, blogs and an audio-visual performance. This latter was a collaboration between Christian and Alex, with the soundtrack emerging from the refinement of that experiment. The soundtrack completes a seven-year cycle of PfB offerings from Christian and the sporadic collective of named and unnamed collaborators known as the Bureau de la Resistance. See postcardsfrombabylon.net for traces.

Gratitudes:
Big thanks to everyone who has lent ears, thoughts, support and other resources to this project during its years of germination.
Big thanks and respect also to all those working for life-affirming change in this crazy world.

For all PfB enquires:
Drop us a line at contact@postcardsfrombablyon.net or get in touch with the artists direct

Alex Forster is a musician, producer and film-maker. alexforster.net
Christian de Sousa is an artist and facilitator. luminousworlds.net