On The Margins

By 14 May, 2025

Life has been hectic, nonetheless I’ve managed to plough through a lot of new music to find a finely tuned set of new Brazilian albums and EPs in which you can hear some sleazy funk, refreshingly original hip-hop, wafting drones, superbly assembled sound-collage, and the cacophony of Avenida Paulista.


Various Artists – Avenida Paulista, da Consolação ao Paraíso (Selo Risco)

This fantastic recording is the soundtrack to a theatrical play by Felipe Hirsch, who adapted David Bowie’s Lazarus here in Brazil. The play recounts life at the heart of São Paulo, the Avenida Paulista, from its origins at Consolação to its end at Paraíso. This wide avenue is so loaded with history and stories that this soundtrack almost does it justice. As you walk down the Paulista, you take in all of humanity, the out-of-towners, the office workers on a cigarette break, the homeless families, the Gen-z skaters, and likewise the artists contributing to this album are just as eclectic, from the old guard of Arnaldo Antunes and Jards Macalé to the new blood of Negro Leo and DJ K, to mention a very select few. The repertoire focuses on the experimental end of MPB, Rodrigo Campos and Rodrigo Ogi sing some canção torta in the finest style of vanguarda paulista on “Fim da Linha”. While the rap by Thalin on “São pra poucas” is just phenomenal, the words tumble out of his mouth as he, for me, reaches dizzying heights of microphone skills, telling us that the city is only for a privileged few AND it samples Sufjan Stevens’ The Black Hawk War.. from Illinois. What more can you ask for? All Paulista life is here, the funk mandelão of Paraisópolis, courtesy of DJ K, to the charming MPB Melodies sung by Alzira E. To my mind this is a significant release if you want to hear some of the best the city has to offer.


BANDÃ – O Aniversário da Mariá (Seminal records)

This is a live recording of the performance of this group of Brazilian women in Berlin, recorded on drummer and vocalist Mariá Portugal’s birthday, hence the title. The only person I was familiar with in the ensemble is Carla Boregas, formerly from São Paulo experimentalists Ratka, who plays electronics here. However, looking at the other members, they all have pretty hefty resumés in experimental music. Marina Cyrina plays amplified flute and toys, Juliana Perdigão on clarinet and voice, and Marcela Lucatelli on piano and voice. The voices are an important element in the performance as the group produce spontaneous music but there’s some pretty emotive and guttural vocal squawks going on, creating an eventful sound somewhere between improv jazz, noise, contemporary classical and folk song. (Released on May 29th, this is not yet available on Bandcamp.)


Õe – Elogio da segunda natureza (Boston Medical Group)

Another reliably marvellous release from friends of the column, the Boston Medical Group. Õe is yet another pseudonym of Marcus Salgado, AKA Professor Marcus, who has just translated a beautiful looking new edition of the Surrealist Manifesto by André Breton, published by 100 Cabeças. At first you relax to the mix of liquid beats and wafting drones and think this release is another fine example of tip-top ambient from BMG, but it needs to be listened to as a whole as it develops into a completely different beast. The EP flows into “Sismografia” and then “Visagem”. which are much more abstract and turbulent, and finally “The Wake” closes things with a warped jacking version of a BMG-style house track.


Disstantes – Cybertropicó (E.I. – Economicamente Inviável)

Disstantes produce a sound that’s not uncommon in South America, an unconcerned stew of genres but always built on a foundation of rap and hardcore, while throwing in elements of reggae, electronics, regional beats, in this case baile funk, and acidly critical lyrics. Gilber T and Augusto Feres provide vocals and play samplers and synths, while Homobono is on guitars and noise box. You can hear the influences of Planet Hemp and Seletores de Frequência, but also DJ Marlboro and the Beastie Boys. For example the opening track “Latino” mixes up Latin rock, an electro-dub bassline, and heavy metal. “Fator 100” uses the melodic vocals of Erica for its chorus with an old-school baile beat and a grungy bassline. This comes with a wonderfully Burroughsian press release written by Silvio Essinger, who wrote the definitive book on baile funk, Batidão, and as he says, “It’s Taxi Driver meets Bacurau”, meaning it’s grimy neon-lit streets meet the favela in all its lo-tech glory, while listening to your free-account Spotify playlist on a shitty bluetooth speaker.


Guilherme Granado Goat Unity – Ghost Parades (Keroxen)/Guilherme Granado & Bruno Abdala – Filhos (Sucata Tapes) 

In my time in Brazil I have seen Guilherme Granado play with a host of names from his home base in math-rock-turned-avant-jazzers Hurtmold to Pharoah Sanders and the São Paulo Underground, as well as on his own. What he does is not always apparent as he sits still at a table with his devices in front of him, but he manages to create loops and add insidious textures that transform the music. In the guise of Goat Unity, he continues his fine work, laying down organic beats and basslines, generating atmospheric tracks that find the connection between the head nodding hip-hop of Rza and the spaced out jazz of Sun Ra’s Arkestra.

On the second release, Granado teams up with Bruno Abdala, whose productions as Alphayatch I’ve been writing about over the years as he toils away in Goiânia, experimenting with traditional sounds and electronics. Anyway, this is a great collaboration, where who does what is not exactly clear, but there’s a tapestry of loops and synthesizers mixed with bells, marimba, vibraphone, viola and a ton of bass. Available on tape if you’re after something physical.


Bufo Borealis – Natureza (Zenyatta Records)

This is the third album from this band led by Juninho Sangiorgio, who is the bassist for Ratos de Porão, a classic São Paulo old-school punk band, and drummer Rodrigo Saldanha, who I once spent an evening with extolling the virtues of the first three Wire albums. So, not an obvious pairing to produce jazz fusion firmly based on prime electric-period Miles Davis and taking in Curtis Mayfield and Lou Donaldson, but that’s what makes it interesting. There’s some really fine playing on display, using the intuitive space of the instruments and leaving some moments for tight blues riffing as well as moments for improvisation. “Ponkan” lays down a sleazy funk riff with Hammond organ stabs, and “Dobok” has elements of cocktail jazz, dub bass, and ’70s Herbie Hancock with a disturbing finish. There are also contributions from Nath Calan of Bixiga 70 and Clayton Martim from the great Recife indie-prog band, Cidadão Instigado.


Iggor Cavalera – Neon Gods (Cold Spring)

Igor Cavalera along with his brother Max Cavalera formed Sepultura, Brazil’s most famous thrash metal export. A couple of years ago I watched Cavalera Conspiracy (the reunited brothers’ project) perform the classic Sepultura album Roots. During the show Igor performed short ambient pieces between the album tracks; these acted as a breather between the intense metal of the main act but also demonstrated where his creative preferences lie nowadays, i.e. in more avant-garde sound projects. This is a shared album with Shane Embury, and Neon Gods is a side-long dark ambient piece. There are various movements within the piece but it slides between darkly ominous drones to burbling and gurgling analogue synths to finishing with near white noise. Nothing very metal about it but it’s found the right home at Cold Spring who specialise in this kind of thing.


Edson Natale & Paulo Brandão – Ruídagem, a garagem das sete lembranças (Spin music)

Edson Natale is a musician and composer with a background in cultural production, while Paulo Brandão is a sound artist who works with immersive auditory experiences using field recordings, noise manipulation, and digital processing. This project is rooted in the concept of ruídos afetivos (affective noise). The pair asked friends and family to send recordings of everyday moments, sounds tied to personal histories. They received over a thousand audio files, most captured on mobile phones, from across Brazil and the world. These fragments of sound ranged from the creak of a farm gate, the murmur during shared meals, the rhythmic sway of a bus, a parent soothing a child, and the mechanical sigh of a breathing ventilator. With these sounds, they stitched together this tightly constructed collage of sound design. There’s a lot to take in: snatches of sound and voice appear, also regional folk music, and I swear I heard bagpipes. It could be a Brazilian version of Stockhausen’s Hymnen or a transistor radio searching for a signal, but they also use individual sounds to make concréte-based rhythms that crunch. An accompanying book is to follow with texts that attempt to find the poetry of everyday noise.


Caio Ocean – Garoto Oceano (Selektah Records)

The name, I’m guessing, must be a homage to a certain Frank, but there’s also a shared eccentric talent for abstract and original hip-hop, full of atmosphere and late night smokey bar vibes. I’m technically late to this one as it came out at the end of last year, but it’s such a brilliant example of Brazilian hip-hop in a genre totally dominated by Trap and artists like Matuê, with his over-processed vocals and dont-give-a-fuck delivery, that it’s a breath of fresh air. The samples are swooning and romantic, using loops of orchestral soul and laid back boom-bap beats. This short but sweet EP is so bursting with ideas and lush atmospheres that I urge you to check it out.


Vera Fischer era Clubber – VERASI (Palatavel Records)

These crazy club cats from Rio have one of those ironic names, like Cansei de ser sexy – named after a Beyoncé quote – that makes sense in the oh-so-irony-filled world of hip gay clubbing. Vera Fischer was a sex symbol turned soap star who certainly frequented many nightclubs and saw the inside of many a bathroom stall. However, this group, from Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, show that the influence of nightclub chroniclers NoPorn lives on, and that is a great thing. Songs are not so much sung but confessed with a world-weary tone and sleazy electro backing. The album starts slowly, intoning nightlife tales over sombre gothic synth tones, then gradually builds up, introducing post-punk basslines with ’80s synth lines. It’s a lot of fun, so perhaps it is time for that electro-clash revival! 


Dimy – …eu sei que eu disse… (Fazenda elétrica records)

Not sure how this got on my radar, but it’s a tiny, unassuming release by an individual called Lucas Olivra, who composes, plays and produces the whole thing, so hats off to him I say. It’s a charming mix of simply plucked acoustic indie, shoe-gaze distortion and slightly baroque arrangements. Every track follows the same ambitious structure using a spoken vocal delivery that seems oddly familiar, almost like the (wonderful) Go-betweens.


trema¨  – BR post Agro (self-released)

To finish, an example of Agronoise from Lucas Lippaus, who attempts to combine rural music from the interior with a dash of atmospheric post-rock and ends up doing in three minutes what usually takes Godspeed You! Black Emperor twenty.


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