Fierce, uproarious, off-the-wall, box-fresh funk carioca.
‘Known for his viral video series Sexta dos Crias, Ramon Sucesso is a virtuosic DJ who crushes, reimagines, and rearranges songs to such a degree that the original tracks become virtually unrecognisable. He has turned his controller into a particle accelerator, creating firework-like bursts of classic funk carioca samples, his own productions, mainstream tracks, nonsense TikTok sound bites, and tons of his trademark beat bolha. All contained within an unparalleled, mischievously non-linear rhythmic flow.
‘Ramon’s social network profiles are as outrageously unpredictable as his mixes. He posts interactive emoji games, bountiful fast-food feasts with his family, comments about the Flamengo football team, and videos of him playing FIFA. He has a prolifically restless mind, constantly riffing and improvising; he does whatever it takes to get by, to navigate the reality of life in Brazil and overcome the daunting challenges of the music industry.
‘Sexta dos Crias is the culmination of Ramon’s DJ work. A LP that embodies the newest in funk carioca, a faithful transposition of the bailes to vinyl. Ramon has unpretentiously ushered in a new age of experimentation for the genre – making a daring and unprecedented foray into a territory where extreme and radical sounds abound.’
A precious few, back in. Check it out if you missed it the first time around.
Astounding, deeply exploratory, previously unreleased work by the legendary Brazilian percussionist and composer.
A wild and unsettling collage, implacably original and startlingly intense — from the electroacoustic opener, which channels ancestral African inspirations into cosmogony, through the proto-mixtape Exemplo de Sintetizadores, which transitions from transcendental drones to astral cha-cha-chas, to a musical consideration of dripping water, in Suite Contagotas.
Djalma is best known for his studio work on benchmark albums, including numerous classics by Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Jorge Ben, and for his own polyrhythmic opus Baiafro; and the finale here was first performed at the 1964 Nós, Por Exemplo concert, an event often cited as the inauguration of the Tropicalia movement. Djalma brings the electronics — medical oscillators, for example — to beef up his percussion. It’s eye-opening.
Corrêa called it ‘spontaneous music’; sonic adventures ranging audaciously across an array of genres, from jazz to deep funk to complete abstraction, all imbued with his signature DIY ethic.
Drawn from the original master-tapes, guided by Corrêa himself, just prior to his death.
Intriguing, immersive music. Dazzling, engrossing artwork, too.
A historian by training, Akira Umeda became a ceramicist, a photographer, a visual artist, a draftsman, a graphic designer, a DJ, a musician, an audio technician, a writer, a researcher… Here are forty-two recordings, ranging over three decades, alluding to the incredible range of his creative work: from songs, to ambient music; from field recordings to prank calls. Drawn from cassette tapes stored in Umeda’s house in São José dos Campos, in São Paulo, Brazil.
This is terrific.
Brazilian post-punk, art rock and DIY from 1988, released here for the first time, by the duo Celso Alves and Kodiak Bachine (whose records with the band Agentss are desperately sought-after nowadays).
Dubwise and rhythmic, percussive and synthy, with tangy Brazilian roots, and a droll humour to its reflections on embalming, LSD and zombies, the music freewheels roughly and vividly from the truffling, chattering, tropical atmospherics of the opener, through to the machine-funk, Romeroesque terrors of the Greenhouse Massacres, to close.
Sung in Portuguese and English, studded with Spanish, French and German, the lyrics are reproduced on an insert. Pressed at Pallas.
Ace. Check it out.