Real nice electro-acoustic collection from Brazilian composer Marcelo Carneiro de Lima who kindly sent us a copy from Rio de Janeiro.
It so happens he’s been researching his field in an academic context since 2014, at the Instituto Villa-Lobos (where he’s a composer and professor) and a post-graduate music program at UNIRIO, and has published on the subject. Beat Studies offers nine slices from his musical work and researches, spanning the period 2014 to 2020. I must say it’s not only exciting and unusual music, but I’m also struck by Carneiro de Lima’s very distinctive approaches – to composition, to ideas, and the sounds he makes. It’s all refreshingly original. I’d like to think it’s the result of radical thinking on the part of the composer, perhaps one who has surveyed the modern state of affairs with many prize-winning composers at Universities and their suites of digital tools, and one who is also aware of the history of this genre; sure enough, he does invoke the “Schaefferian tradition” in his notes, proving he’s well aware of the origins of musique concrète.
But I think mostly the music comes directly from Carneiro de Lima himself; he admits to drawing inspiration and ideas from his “personal, bodily, chaotic listening.” In that simple phrase there’s scope for a lot of spontaneity, a lot of aesthetic freedom of choice, as well as the acts of randomness that determine the behaviour of just about everyone in modern urban life now. I like the idea of a fellow who listens first, asks questions later. And seems to be guided by wherever his feet may take him across the overcrowded arenas of the world. I often worry that modern electro-acoustic work is too dry, the composers too pleased with their own “ideas” and concepts to let the music grow organically, and they won’t let a sound speak for itself. None of this applies to today’s record, which oozes, pulsates and twitches with the juices of life, and is loaded from top to bottom with unusual yet wholly natural and humanistic sounds. On board so far.
Also he claims the title Beat Studies is inspired by “electronic dance music genres”, a fact which may cause some to groan at the prospect of another modernist composer trying to “get down” with the kids, but on the few instances he lets this influence creep into the music, the results are a joy. The title track for example is 8:30 mins of naive electronics with a clunky beat and numerous interjections from a library of field recordings – not lacking a sense of humour neither. And on ‘Lulu Beat’ there’s a technique not unlike Porter Ricks and others credited with “dub mixing” for their 1990s electronic experiments. Then there’s the political dimension, which he freely owns up to – he calls it an “ideological album packed with irony”, showing how he’ll readily undercut his own notions if he think he’s getting too serious about it. You won’t find political slogans or ranting verbiage on these tracks, but the political critique is I suppose applied in musical forms, forms which change and disintegrate, and pose questions and puzzles. It’s pleasing to see him namecheck Tom Zé as part of this process – Tom Zé who, along with Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa and Gilberto Gil were founders of the Tropicália movement in Brazil. Although feted nowadays as “cool weird music” among hipsters who love Os Mutantes and bought the Soul Jazz comp, Tropicália also fostered deeply critical thinking about modern politics in that country, at a time when it was under the rule of a military dictatorship. The musicians (and poets) weren’t just critical of that, but also attacked the complaisant left-winger intellectuals who weren’t doing anything about it. In the late 1960s, their version of the Summer of Love was arguably the most radical, pleasing no-one and causing trouble with everyone. If the political thinking of Marcelo Carneiro de Lima is in that lineage, it adds another spicy dimension to the record.
All of these elements, I think, are drawn together for him in the conceptual idea of hybridization, which he’s borrowed from the Argentinean philosopher Néstor García Canclini, and it’s this which has guided his research since 2014. It’s given him the freedom to entertain paradoxes, and the freedom to make his music a real mixture of things, of sounds, of ideas. This freedom, this delicious chaos, and the joy of doing it, are all exhibited on this excellent collection. From 10 February 2023.