No Owner: Interview with Xavier Godart, Birtawil
Bir Tawil is a strip of desert on the Egypt-Sudan border that neither country claims. In 2013, a musician from Bordeaux, Xavier Godart, named his solo project after it. The logic turned out to run deeper than the name. Dua Min, Birtawil’s 2026 album, is a record about what happens when unclaimed territory finally gets a structure imposed on it: drum machines, live performance, industrial coldness, and six tracks in Esperanto that move from feeling to death. Godart on autonomy, solitude, and the cost of friction.
One strip of desert between Egypt and Sudan has no owner. Neither country claims it. The territory called Bir Tawil appears on maps without belonging to any state, without legal standing, without a sovereign. In 2013, a musician from Bordeaux named Xavier Godart came across it on Wikipedia while putting music online for the first time, and he named a project after it. Birtawil compresses those two words into one.
The name turned out to be a blueprint. Over the decade that followed, Godart worked entirely alone under that name, composing, recording, mixing, and mastering without outside input, without genre allegiance, without a band. The earlier records, including Sonra (2019) and Śudha (2020), carried a drone and ambient practice built around long-form guitar and open improvisation. With ĦOLL in 2022, the project shifted harder toward electronics and colder structural forms. Dua Min, released in February 2026, is the record where the unclaimed territory gets a structure imposed on it. Its six tracks were written between January and March 2025, tested on a tour in April, and recorded over the summer.
Godart is also a member of Mortuaire and was formerly part of The Great Old Ones, the atmospheric black metal band from Bordeaux.
On Dua Min, the drum machine sets the terms from the opening track. “Sento” runs on a dialogue between solo guitar and percussion that sits closer to industrial music than to the open ambient drift of Birtawil’s earlier work. The electronics provide the frame; the ambience fills in around it. Six tracks, over 40 minutes: tighter and more compressed than anything that came before under this name, built on repetition and sustained pressure. The coldness is real. Underneath it something aggressive accumulates: the guitar approach calls to mind a more hostile version of Earth, Dylan Carlson’s Seattle drone metal project, same long tones and slow movement, but angrier, less meditative, less willing to let the listener settle. By the time “Morton” arrives, the final track whose title translates simply as death, the music has moved into territory that is harder to name and harder to shake.
Doomnation Radio: The name Birtawil compresses the two words of Bir Tawil, the uninhabited, unclaimed territory on the Egypt-Sudan border. A place that exists geographically but has no sovereign state, no owner. What drew you to that idea as the conceptual ground for this project?
Xavier Godart: When I started putting music online back in 2013, I needed a name, and I liked the idea of creating a space that was entirely mine. A kind of autonomous zone for my music. I was spending too much time on Wikipedia at the time, and I came across the Bir Tawil page. That image still resonates with me today, even if I might have chosen differently had I known the project would last this long. At this point, I’m a bit stuck with it.
DR: The track titles on Dua Min follow a consistent linguistic pattern across the album. Could you tell us what language you’re working in, and how it connects to the record as a whole?
I used Esperanto, but it’s purely an aesthetic choice. Each track has a meaning in my mind, but I don’t want the titles to be too explicit, so I translate them into languages I don’t know until I find words that sound pleasing to my ears. Sometimes I use multiple languages, sometimes just one, like on Dua Min.
The six titles translate as: Sento (feeling), Ceesto (presence), Malpleno (emptiness), Konfirmon (confirmation), Pacon (peace), Morton (death). Whether that sequence was designed or arrived by accident, it holds. Esperanto itself fits the project’s logic in ways Xavier may not have intended: invented in 1887 by Polish ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof as a constructed international language, it belongs to no nation, claims no territory of its own. The autonomous zone extends into the nomenclature.
DR: You describe Dua Min as the first album you wrote specifically to be performed live, whereas previously you kept studio and live work separate. What changed, and what did it mean in practice to build music with the stage already in mind?
In the past, I kept studio work and live performance completely separate. Studio recordings allowed me to escape the constraints of being alone, while live shows forced me into a more minimal setup. As a result, I never really performed my albums on stage, and I wrote music specifically for live performances.
After a nearly three-year break, I was invited to play the Culthe Festival 2025 (in Münster, Germany), but I didn’t feel connected to my older material anymore. So I decided to write a completely new set that would work live first, and then become an album.
In practice, that meant thinking about structure, flow, and playability from the beginning. The music became more intentional.
That formulation is worth stopping on. Studio recordings allowed Godart to escape the constraints of being alone: working in complete solitude is the condition under which he gets to be more than one person, layering and responding to his own material, inhabiting the roles a band would distribute across multiple bodies. The stage collapses that. Live, there is one person, one instrument chain, one moment. The music that had been built across time in a room now has to exist in real time in front of people. Writing Dua Min for the stage first meant accepting that compression before the record even began.
DR: The album was written between January and March 2025, taken on tour in April for refinement, then recorded over the summer. What did the live refinement period actually do to the compositions? What arrived in the studio that wouldn’t have been there otherwise?
Not that much, it was mainly structural. Some parts felt too long or too short once I played them in front of an audience, and others felt unnecessary. I added a few elements here and there, but overall it’s probably 85% the same. It’s interesting how your perception shifts between writing alone at home and performing the same material live.
The stage turned out to be the first external constraint Birtawil had ever worked inside. An audience imposes structural demands that a solo practice in a room simply cannot. The compositions held, but their proportions changed.
DR: The guitar is still the central instrument, but drum machines and synthesizers now shape the architecture around it. What does that shift feel like from inside the writing process? Is it a different kind of attention than working with guitar alone?
A lot of my past work has been based on instinct and improvisation, kind of like automatic writing. But after 10 years, I felt like I needed to move away from that a little bit.
I had a pretty clear idea of the aesthetic I wanted to move toward. I was listening to quite a lot of dark, monolithic stuff. Stéphane (who I play with in Mortuaire) had introduced me to an Australian band called My Disco, which I listened to a lot. I’m really drawn to very stripped-down, direct approaches. Other bands I had in mind around that time, off the top of my head: Fvnerals, Oranssi Pazuzu, Khanate… I’m not sure it really comes through that much on the album in the end, but that’s what I had in my ears at the time.
Adding drum machines helped to reach this vision. They change the way the music is structured. It introduces a stronger sense of rhythm and framing, which naturally leads to more defined and monolithic forms. When I was working mostly with guitar, the process was more fluid, often based on long improvisations and evolving textures. Now, there’s a more architectural approach, more intention behind each element. It’s still exploratory, but less purely instinctive than before.
The drum machine is the instrument that makes the grid audible. His bandmate Stéphane in Mortuaire had been playing him My Disco, the Melbourne post-punk band whose records run on machine-like stripped-down form, repetition as architecture rather than decoration. Khanate was in rotation at the same time: the American extreme doom project that vocalist Alan Dubin and guitarist Stephen O’Malley assembled in the early 2000s, built around guitar pressed to its slowest and most corrosive point. Fvnerals, the British doom and drone duo, and Oranssi Pazuzu, the Finnish band that pulls psychedelic black metal into slow, pressurized dissolution, occupied similar territory in his headspace. These are artists who impose constraint on themselves, who treat reduction as the primary compositional act. The drum machine brought that logic inside Birtawil for the first time.
DR: Your live shows use video projections assembled from archival documentary footage. How do you choose that footage? What relationship are you building between the images and the music?
Usually the video work comes after the music. I spend some time on the Internet Archive collecting old archival footage, and I try to find pieces that fit the music, either aesthetically or thematically. Then I layer and arrange them using VJ softwares to prepare the live set. Often, happy accidents happen during that phase, where a specific scene lines up with a particular riff and fits perfectly.
The Internet Archive is a repository of orphaned material: footage and recordings that belong to no one, held in common because there is nowhere else for them to go. Xavier searches it for images that fit the music aesthetically or thematically, then layers them until a scene lines up with a riff by accident. That “happy accident” is less an anomaly in his practice than its governing principle. The automatic writing of the earlier records, the structural adjustments that arrived through live performance, the Esperanto words chosen for sound rather than meaning: the work accumulates its sense through collision rather than design. Birtawil has always been a project where the meaning shows up uninvited.
DR: You described ĦOLL as the beginning of this shift, and Dua Min as the next step. Previous album titles have come from Maltese, Sanskrit, Arabic geography. There’s a pattern of languages that are either extinct, constructed, or without a national state of their own. Is that deliberate?
The languages I use are purely an aesthetic choice. When an idea translates into a word that sounds pleasing to me, I use it. There’s no particular meaning behind the choice of one language over another.
DR: When you work alone across every stage, composition through mastering, what does that solitude produce that collaboration can’t, and what does it cost?
Working alone across the entire chain creates a kind of immediacy and honesty that’s hard to reproduce in a group. You can move at your own pace, follow instinct without negotiation, and let ideas exist in their rawest form. In my case, that sometimes meant recording and releasing things on Bandcamp in a single weekend, without overthinking or long-term planning. That spontaneity becomes a space to purge frustration, especially if you’re used to the slower, more complex decision-making of a band.
It also turns the project into a kind of sandbox. Alone, you can explore directions that wouldn’t necessarily fit elsewhere, looser forms, different instruments, aesthetics that go outside of more codified genres. That freedom is deeply liberating, and over time, those experiments often feed back into collaborative projects. You end up expanding your vocabulary without constraints.
But that solitude comes with a cost. When you’re alone at every stage, you lose friction, the productive kind that comes from other people challenging your ideas. There’s no one to push back, no external perspective to break you out of your own patterns, and it’s easy to go in circles. You’re also fully responsible for every decision, which can be both empowering and exhausting.
In the end, it’s a balance. The solo work becomes essential precisely because it contrasts with collaboration. It gives you space to explore freely, but it also reminds you why a collective matters. Coming back to a group after that kind of isolation can feel incredibly energizing, like reconnecting with something that sharpens and expands what you can do alone.
That cost is precisely what Dua Min set out to introduce.Dua Min set out to introduce. The stage was friction. The drum machine is friction. The decision to write music that had to survive an audience rather than just satisfy a room: that too. The album is Birtawil under external pressure for the first time in its history, and the result is the most compressed, most legible record the project has made.
What Godart names as his earlier foundation gives Dua Min its actual coordinates. Barn Owl, the American drone-psych duo from San Francisco whose long-form guitar work built sustained fields of sound from very little material, and Earth, whose early 1990s recordings sit at the origins of the whole slow guitar tradition: these are the roots the record grows from. They represent a practice built entirely on drift and duration, music that resists resolution by refusing to set terms. The drum machines and the colder industrial grain arriving on Dua Min are the first things in this project’s history that set terms. The earlier influences are still in the foundation. The foundation now has walls. Whether that counts as progress depends on what you thought the open ground was for.
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