Araça Azul
Oct. 14th, 2005 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
From time to time you become fascinated with an album, play it again and again. An album becomes a door to somewhere you need to go, a dizzying view of freedoms, techniques, possibilities. An album—and it might be an old one, disowned even by its creator—is suddenly just right for just now, the answer to a debate, a quandry, a search. When all other albums seem like repetitions and dead-ends, suddenly an album is an open door with a starry sky behind it. You step through, into its weirdness, into its familiarity.Right now, I feel this way about an album whose sleeve shows a man in underpants and what looks like an afro wig, gazing at himself in a mirror. It's Araça Azul, the 1973 album from Caetano Veloso. "Conspicuously non-commercial" is how Japan Times describes the record, "a mix of psychedelic rock, tribal drumming, pregnant silences and experimental vocals". To my ears it's just very daring, very experimental. There's a fascinating mix of warm textures and playful techniques with miking, pitching, texture, stereo placement. Vocal notes are sounded, held, varied by microtones, joined by single guitar notes. A song comes along, but it's just fragments of a song, with Dada-assonant nursery-rhyme lyrics. There are African-sounding tribal chants, over-the-top brass epics which give way to field-recordings of traffic jams, a wigged-out rock number, bits that sound like Bell lab tape cut-up music, whistling, stuff that sounds like concrete poetry or (very) underground theatre. I can hear Cornelius loud and clear here—this was surely a huge influence on his "Point" album (known in my house as "Disappoint" and "Vanishing Point", but still...)—and the playful post-Fluxus experiments of Tomomi Adachi and his Royal Chorus.
Veloso himself seems now to think that Araça Azul is pants. He's since turned his back on what he calls its "insolent experimentalism", calling the record "a failure" and "the last stand". His audience at the time seemed to agree: many took the record back to the shop, demanding a refund. But when he heard that Cornelius had made a cover of "Giberto Misterioso" for the tribute record "Caetano Lovers", Veloso seemed rather touched:
"'Gilberto Misterioso,' that's great."
Is he pleased with that?
"Yeah, well, the others are well-chosen, but they are also well-known and this one's not that well-known."
That was Cornelius' pick.
"It was him that chose that one? Oh, that's nice," he says with real warmth." (Japan Times)
Caetano made Araça Azul in 1972, on his return to Brazil after three years of political exile in London. And it's not hard to hear a two-finger salute to Brazil's military dictatorship in the record's defiant freedom from convention, its license. "I'm an artist, and artists can do what they like," the man whose head had once been shaved by the regime's thugs seems to be saying.
To explain why the record is important to me personally just now, I'd have to send you back—again!—to writings like Cute Formalism and The Electro-Acoustics of Humanism. I'd have, in other words, to repeat the story of where I was in the 90s, and where I am now. I suspect my reasons for being fascinated with the record are quite similar to Cornelius's. In the 90s we were both doing this easy-breezy loungecore thing, although Cornelius tended a bit more to the noisy cut-and-paste side of things and I tended more to some kind of uneasy compromise between the disturbing and the relaxing. But we both espoused tick-tocky rhythms (the bossa-like electronic Maestro rhythms you can hear on "Star Fruits Surf Rider" and all over my 1998 and 1999 albums) and "pop baroque" structures, with lots of sampling and genre-hopping. This fitted into "the loungecore revival", and "Shibuya-kei", and some of the stuff American artists like Beck and the Beastie Boys were up to.
But by the end of the 90s Shibuya-kei was dead. Most of the artists involved started to get more experimental, to distinguish themselves, perhaps, from the hordes of copyists and parodists appearing on labels like Escalator and Bungalow. Programs like Max/MSP came along to granulate and filter sound in new ways, and with it new possibilities for the Cute Formalists to make Sound Dust. Where once she was making hit singles and TV commercials, Kahimi Karie is now recording with Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Ensemble. If that particular career path is modelled, perhaps, on figures like Bjork and Brigitte Fontaine, Cornelius's swing towards ambient sound, acoustic guitars and Tropicalia pointillisme is undoubtedly modelled on Caetano's 1972 record; an index of possibilities, a marriage of the warm and the freaky.
I remember once visiting Arto Lindsay in his apartment in Chelsea. He had stacks of books and CDs everywhere. I started flipping through them all. I wanted to know if there had been any Brazilian artists who made electronic bossa, something like a Brazilian Bruce Haack. Arto seemed stumped. There was nobody quite like that, but had I heard Caetano's Araça Azul? Tom Zé? All I'd heard from Caetano was his first record, Domingo. And I'd got it—don't laugh—because the editor of Relax magazine had nominated it the ultimate "Sunday People" record. The ideal record to listen to in your Kamakura summer house, sipping macciato, wearing deck shoes. The ultimate gooey, melting, sophisticated easy listening record, a record for affluent slow lifers and Japanese yuppies. That's why I bought it, and how I used it.Arto is, of course, a good friend of Caetano's, and produced some of his 90s albums. I haven't heard those yet. I'll get round to them, I'm sure. But for now, it's Araça Azul that fascinates me. For its mixture of warmth and experimentalism, songs and pure sound. For the fact that it's the very opposite of generic or reassuring. For the fact that you're never going to hear it playing in the background in a Tokyo cafe. For its impish, zany, willful perversity. For its huge sense of freedom and self-license. For just how great and interesting and exotic it sounds, playing from my system, into my apartment, filling the space with invisible parrots, radical politics, unexplored possibilities. And for the fact that, in the way it marries the easy-breezy and the sing-songy with a formal interest in acoustics and how sound can determine structure, it's addressing the key questions of the place—the historical and formal place—I now find myself in. Post-something and pre-something else, no doubt. Wearing pants and an afro wig, probably.
Araça Azul sampler file (4.2 MB, 4mins 35secs)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 09:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 09:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 11:38 am (UTC)It has everything a pop record needs: false starts, hysteria, nasal singing, whimsy, nervousness...a song like "Algo Mais"...ooooh aaaah.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 09:58 am (UTC)So, I have hard for reading reviews, words from friends and hype at times. I always expect the best and then when I listen to the record it's perhaps a big dissappointment. So I just shelve the record.
But then suddenly, after a while of shelving the record, I get into a period and looks at the record again and thinks "hmmm, I'll give it another chance". Voila! I got myself some new sights and sounds.
Or when you just find an album by an artist you have never heard of and listen to it for the first time and think "gosh, this is fantastic". I got that feeling when I once found Joanna Newsom's album "the milk-eyed mender". Described as "Bjork if she played harp" it was a sort of appalachian folk, harp and genre blending.
Hmm, Kahimi Karie is working with Otomo Yoshihide? He's one of my heros! I got this Ground Zero album, Recolutionary pekinese opera, with samplings from a chinese communist opera where he puts of this amazing guitarnoisesolo after 4 minutes of ambient and percussion.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 12:01 pm (UTC)stimulating read as always..i shall endeavour to partake forthwith
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 12:23 pm (UTC)Another interesting and obscure album is called "A Paixão de V Segundo Ele Próprio" by Vitor Ramil (http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:wgjx7i82g75r~T1), very much in the same avant pop vein of "Araca Azul".
For the record, I find Tom Ze unbearable.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 12:42 pm (UTC)I have heard that Kazu Makino sang in a Caetano album, don't know which.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 12:48 pm (UTC)From clips of his new record (http://www.vitorramil.com.br/discos/longes.htm#), Vitor Ramil sounds a bit like U2 on mogadon. I'm sure he was better in the 70s or something...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 01:14 pm (UTC)If was I looking for any breakthrough contemporary artists, South America would be one of the last places I'd go to. Albums like "Araca Azul" are a bit of a one-off because third-world countries are not charming, suave and sensual, rather they are way more quirky, jazzy and manic!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 01:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 02:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 04:24 pm (UTC)I saw Tom Ze perform in collabaration with Tortoise at the London Barbican in 2001, and despite being hyped by everyone, everywhere, I remember the whole thing was in turns largely perplexing, impenetrable, underwhelming, and disappointing. Tortoise where predictably slick in their back seat role as a backing band, but Ze fudged it IMHO, seemingly playing more on his eccentricities to try and endear himself to the mostly confused audience rather than through his music.
Rob
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 04:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 08:21 pm (UTC)Caetano Veloso also wrote a not self-deprecating song called London, London (http://www.asklyrics.com/display/Veloso_Caetano/London,_London_Lyrics/108335.htm).
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 09:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 09:37 pm (UTC)Rob
?
Date: 2005-10-14 09:56 pm (UTC)I dislike Tortoise rather a lot, but the fact that Mr Santana Martins happened to tour with them doesn't mean he is part of them... I believe he's far too interesting an artist for that...
Re: ?
Date: 2005-10-15 08:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 12:23 pm (UTC)Last time I had the experience was a few monts ago when I got Os Afro Sambas by Baden Powell. I actually looked at a copy of Araça Azul at that time, considerig to buy it but I was kind of shocked by the sleeve :)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 02:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 02:29 pm (UTC)Not. A. Fan.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 08:33 pm (UTC)I love Caetano's work
Date: 2005-10-14 03:10 pm (UTC)I also very much enjoyed Caetano's autobiographical 'Tropical Truth', though it seems to be pretty hard to find now...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 03:32 pm (UTC)Yes, similarly in my home "Otto Spooky" has become known as "Not So Good-ky".
Is it just me?
Date: 2005-10-14 04:17 pm (UTC)But Slash in a Speedo?
Now THERE'S a song title!
the only steady way to communicate
Date: 2005-10-14 04:55 pm (UTC)much love,
john/ fashion flesh
WWW.FASHIONFLESH.COM
Re: the only steady way to communicate
Date: 2005-10-15 03:31 am (UTC)Don't complain.
You used to work at Best Buy.
Re: the only steady way to communicate
Date: 2005-10-17 12:19 am (UTC)more and more love,
john flesh
Re: the only steady way to communicate
Date: 2005-10-17 12:32 am (UTC)love love love,
john flesh
Re: the only steady way to communicate
Date: 2005-10-16 06:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 05:10 pm (UTC)GILBERTO
GIL....................................................................................................now I'll never find these records. This week people can't give them away, next week they will be out of my price range.
more love,
john
www.fashionflesh.com
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 05:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 06:40 pm (UTC)Saturnian Caetano
Date: 2005-10-14 07:12 pm (UTC)artists urge towards both order AND chaos seems
to be a neccessary one-- and it's a good thing,
unless the "battle" gets too lopsided.
I find it interesting that Veloso dismissed
his more Dionysian impulses as "insolent
experimentalism". I wonder how "ordered" his
songwriting process could possibly be, since his
songs have always been quirky enough to suggest a bit of
experimentING.
But I guess if I was "Three Dog Night" and
just saw Fluxus and then chose Dick Higgins over
Randy Newman for my next record, I might regret
that move later.
Mike Z
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 07:34 pm (UTC)Are you certain it's a wig? That was a popular hair style in Brazil at the time (much like the "Detroit Afro" in the US around the same time).
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-14 09:04 pm (UTC)brazilian
Date: 2005-10-14 07:59 pm (UTC)I have to tell too that really he´s come a long way from araça azul. Its hard to teel if for the best or for the worst. actually in one of those interviews you linked to, he explained very well: brazilian industry in general is so fragile, he felt it was irresponsible to being so much experimental. I mean, he thought it was wiser to bring some of that into the mainstream. to add strangeness and rich lyrics into pop music. we sort of take him for granted, because he´s been around for so long, but he has a very rich work.
vitor ramil is pretty good too and I can see paralels between their works. and he has gone to be more pop, I guess. in the same spirit: bring some strangeness to the masses. I think its a very worth point of view.
Odyr
"Every calm revolution under a laser, hissless..."
Date: 2005-10-14 09:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-15 03:27 am (UTC)have you heard...
Date: 2005-10-15 04:36 am (UTC)i think you:d like it.
re: domingo
Date: 2005-10-15 03:36 pm (UTC)Re: domingo
Date: 2005-10-16 10:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-16 06:33 pm (UTC)This is a recent reissue of a 70's Brazilian record worth checking out: http://www.forcedexposure.com/artists/cortes.e.ze.ramalho.lula.html I like it lots.
Caetano Albums favorites?
Date: 2005-10-17 02:42 am (UTC)MUITO, BICHO, CORES NOMES, and TROPICALIA 2.
Re: Caetano Albums favorites?
Date: 2006-05-04 06:37 pm (UTC)songs: a little more blue, triste bahia