Pascal composes and produces music for film, TV, his band, and multichannel art installations. Here’s a photo of him gazing meaningfully at the camera while he waits for a panini:

***The Same Cave*** is my 5th solo LP, and my first solo departure from folk songs into electronic music. Imagined and realised throughout 2021 in my Melbourne home studio, the project began spontaneously – late nights on my computer experimenting with mangling found sounds and old recordings – but quickly became more conceptually grounded.
Taking the lush instrument and vocal parts from my 2019 folk LP ***Cave Without A Name*** and digitally re-appropriating them, I began writing a new suite of highly detailed, melodically rich electronic pieces. Undulating between ambient expanses to frenetic pulsing rhythms, the songs share DNA with their folk song counterparts, yet exist in an entirely different musical dimension.
Out now on Eternal Music Projects.

LISTEN | installation

Originally designed as a multichannel installation for Rising Festival's 'The Wilds' at Sidney Myer Music Bowl, ***Decon Mass*** is a cleansing sonic shower mirroring the three levels of decontamination: general cleaning, disinfection, and sterilisation. Created by Pascal Babare and Mark Rhys Mitchell, the work utilised multiple speaker arrays and physics-based algorithms over three sites, deploying synthesised and processed sounds to create an atmosphere both organic and otherworldly. These stereo mixes can be listened to individually or played back simultaneously for increased effect.

Salon Et Lumière was shown as part of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Triennial exhibition, and a musical collaboration between Pascal Babare, Mark Rhys Mitchell, and Cornel Wilczek. The installation aimed to recreate the exhilaration experienced by nineteenth-century audiences in a twenty-first-century context, utilising projection-mapping and an immersive soundscape to capture for today’s audiences the immersive thrill felt by their forebears more than a century and a half ago. By selectively illuminating and scoring an assortment of stories drawn from the many narratives on display in the Salon Gallery – animalia, love and loss, music, punishment, clouds, horses, and the colour pink – Salon et lumière embodies the clamorous power of these great exhibitions.

LISTEN | score

LISTEN | songs

Songwriting & Production

‘Cave Without A Name’ is my fourth solo LP. Released in 2021 it’s my most stripped-back approach to songwriting and production to date, with some beautiful playing from friends Lucy Roleff (harp & voice), Peter Head (cello), Sebastian Beswick (clarinet), and Leyla Varela (voice). Get in touch if you want a lovely hand made vinyl CD.

SHITWAVE is a collection of musical meanderings and freak outs, edited down from hours of improvisations recorded back between 2007-2009 with my old time friend Mike Waiser. It’s a fun and loose sonic journey, and it’s dear to my heart.

My third LP, ‘**Endless Room**’, is an eclectic (or all over the shop) suite of songs. It’s warm, analogue, and overflowing with too many parts, but there’s some nice songs on there. Cover artwork is by Seth Searle.

AT/ALL is an electro-pop collaboration between Matthew Nicholson, Lucy Roleff, and myself. SUN DOG is the only LP we’ve released thus far, and I mixed and co-produced it.

Suburban Horse is Mallee Songs’s 3rd LP, released in 2018. Engineered by Casey Hartnett and mixed and produced by me, it’s a bit of a cracker if I do say so myself.

Lucy Roleff released this absolute gem in 2019, and I was lucky enough to help her put it together. I played some piano, guitar, and percussion on the record, and engineered and mixed it.

Old time friend and collaborator Alex Badham released the first Victory Lap LP in 2020, and it’s called Bleakened At Blernie’s. I don’t think it’s a reference to Bernie Sanders, but there are lots of other great references on the album, and Alex is a really great songwriter. I mixed the record and I think it’s a really good one.

In 2015 I helped put together Mallee Songs' second LP, Natural Times. I co-wrote a few of the songs, and mixed and produced the album, as well as played a bunch of bits.

More about me:

I was born in Australia on the very same day and year as Drake (the rapper / producer). I spent my early childhood living between Melbourne, Sydney, and Lake County California, setting fire to other people’s property and looking after a long haired Bactrian camel named Jingle Baba. At around five years old I sent a letter to Brian Wilson, thanking him for Pet Sounds. He wrote back when I was in my early teens with a signed photo of him and his poodle in front of a wall of Pet Sounds LPs. I had cancer (non-hodgkins lymphoma) when I was six, an experience which has influence a lot of the music I make.

At around age eleven I inherited a drumkit from a feminist power punk trio (friends of my mum) and started teaching myself to play. When I was thirteen I started learning the blues guitar but lost interest. I then started to play the trumpet but decided it was too hard. After that I began learning the piano but I think I got distracted by something. Then I discovered the computer, and in between playing video games and exploring some dubious internet sites on a dial up connection, I started making very chilled out beats, directly influenced by a heavy pot addiction and a lot of chillout compilations. Thanks to the trojan virus, no one will ever hear this music. At around 15, inspired by the spontaneous jam sessions I had with the cool older people living with me and my mum in our Balwyn share house, I started recording some guitar noodling on the inbuilt microphone on a laptop. These noodlings would later become Thunderclap Spring, my first solo LP.

Shortly before my 20th birthday I moved to Kyoto, and quickly fell in love with the rivers, bathhouses, mountains, and otherworldly broken flute sounds of the recycling trucks there. I left for Europe a year later, where I toured with band Function Ensemble for a month. The tour finished in Berlin, where I stayed for another year, beginning work on what would become my second solo LP, Sorry, Morning.

When Berlin got too cold, I moved to London, where I schmoozed my way into a temp gardening agency, not actually knowing anything about gardening or horticulture. They would later send me to work at the Buckingham Palace Gardens where I filled in for a Royal Gardener who was on long service leave. There I enjoyed delicious roast lunches daily (on the house); watched the Queen take her morning walks through the undulating misty grounds; and endured several vicious attacks from her royal gang of corgy’s (who are both drawn to and enraged by the sounds of leaf blowers and lawn mowers). Also in London, having almost completed Sorry, Morning, I was signed to indie label Blackmaps, who would go on to release Thunderclap Spring in 2009, and Sorry, Morning in 2014.

Returning to Melbourne in 2009 I began studying video art at RMIT, but halfway through I jumped ship to to sound art, where I completed my BFA. I’ve since written 2 more LPs (Endless Room and Cave Without A Name), scored award winning theatre production “The Waiting Place” by Ahmarnya Price, played with and produced records for lots of great bands, and written music for a bunch of TV shows and films at and around Electric Dreams studio alongside friend and collaborator Cornel Wilczek. Some notable TV and film projects include: Amazon documentary “Burning”; Netflix series “Surviving Summer”; Channel Ten miniseries “Lie With Me”; ABC miniseries “Stateless”; Netflix documentary “Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator”; Adam Goodes documentary “The Australian Dream”; and documentary "Westwind - Djalu’s Legacy". Alongside friend and collaborator Mark Mitchell, we designed and composed multichannel sound installation “The Wilds” and then “Decon Mass” for both 2020 and 2021 Rising festivals, respectively. Mark, Cornel and I collaborated on the sound and music for NGV’s multichannel installation “Salon et Lumière”, which was shown as part of their Triennial exhibition.

Currently I live and work in Melbourne’s inner north with my wife, son, and dog.