Birtawil unveils ‘Sento’ from upcoming ‘Dua Min’
Birtawil (Photo by Charlotte Pneumonie)
French drone/ambient solo project Birtawil (aka Xavier Godart) will release the new single “Sento” as the first preview of the upcoming album “Dua Min”, which is scheduled for 27 February 2026. The project is led by Bordeaux-based musician Xavier Godart, known from Mortuaire, Spectrale, LAVA and as a former member of The Great Old Ones.
“Sento” as a further step in the project’s recent shift toward a harsher, more industrial-inflected sound, and comes with an accompanying video.
With “Dua Min”, Xavier Godart continues the transformation that started earlier in the decade. Guitar remains the central instrument but is now mixed with drum machines and synthesizers, pushing the music toward a more electronic, industrial sound.
The “Dua Min” album will be released digitally, with a cassette edition already available for pre-order via the project’s Bandcamp page, where Birtawil’s full back catalogue is hosted.
About Birtawil
Birtawil is the solo project of French musician Xavier Godart, based in Bordeaux and active since 2013. Godart is also involved in projects such as Mortuaire, Spectrale and LAVA, and previously played in the French atmospheric metal band The Great Old Ones.
From the outset Birtawil has focused on minimalist, long-form compositions built from guitars, synthesizers, looping and effects oriented toward minimalism and obscurity. The music mixes ambient, drone, post-rock and industrial.
The project’s early years started via a sequence of self-released digital titles on Bandcamp. Starting with “Möön” in 2014, Birtawil issued “Cinis Ignis” and “Una / Meta” in 2015, followed by “Madde”, “Inodarika” and other sessions that established its long-form approach to drone and guitar atmospheres. During the second half of the 2010s, Birtawil continued to refine this template, releasing works such as “Ese”, “Kenal”, “Moea” (a collaboration with System Morgue) and live recordings that documented the project’s gradual move toward more structured, rhythmically anchored material.
A new phase began with the full-length “Sonra” in 2019 and “Śudha” in 2020, both long-form albums that combined extended guitar drones with more pronounced dynamic arcs and layered arrangements. In 2022 Birtawil released the album “ĦOLL”, darker, more structured and more electronic than earlier work, alongside live documents such as “Live @ Les Vivres De L’Art” and “Live at Les Sens de Nyx” and the studio release “In Between”, which strengthened the project’s ties to experimental electronic and industrial-leaning sound design.
By 2022 Birtawil’s catalogue counted more than a dozen releases.
On stage, the music is extended by video projections composed of collages of old archival documentaries: degraded, ghostlike image fragments.
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