Desconstrução. A portrait of São Paulo's musical scene: v/a

For a very long time São Paulo, « a cidade cinza » (the grey city), had the sinister reputation of being samba’s grave. Not anymore. Today, it definitely is the place to be, the cradle of the liveliest music scene of all Brazilian cities. This first compilation of the young Goma Gringa label stands as a manifesto of this effervescence.

Desconstrução is more than just a snapshot of Goma Gringa's catalogue references. It is a portrait of the most exciting of São Paulo’s musicians today, following the path and many projects of Juçara Marçal, Kiko Dinucci, Rodrigo Campos, Thiago França, and their friends.

Desconstrução gathers tracks from several albums already considered landmarks in Brazilian music of the 21st century: Juçara Marçal’s Encarnado (2014), the trio Metá Metá’s Metá Metá (2011) and MetaL MetaL (2012), Rodrigo Campos’s Bahia Fantástica (2012) and Conversas com Toshiro (2015), Thiago França’s Malagueta, Perus e Bacanaço (2013) and Space Charanga R.A.N. (2015), and Vicente Barreto’s Cambaco (2015).

To miss this crucial point these credits would be meaningless:
They all usually play on each other’s albums whether it is a band or a solo project! So any album is both quite personal and very collective!

Juçara Marçal, Kiko Dinucci, Marcelo Cabral, Rodrigo Campos, Romulo Fróes, Sérgio Machado, Thiago França and a few others are not a movement. They are togetherness in motion, always linked from one project to the next. A movement’s single direction would be far too straight a path for artists who prefer the torto, the awry and askew ways. On “Cobra Rasteira” Kiko Dinucci sings “nem todo trajeto é reto,”  (not all path is straight).

The desconstrução is the first step. Their project as a whole is to dismantle traditional patterns whether they be from samba, jazz, rock, afrobeat or most of all MPB. The aim is not to definitely take them out but is instead to build up their music from them. Undoing to rebuilt.

This “Metá Torto” collective is a gathering of diverse backgrounds and strong personalities, most of whom are both self educated composers and performers. Rodrigo Campos and Kiko Dinucci are both from São Paulo’s suburbs.  Rodrigo was born and raised in São Mateus, where he forged his skills in the universe of rodas de samba. Kiko is from Guarulhos, where he played punk-rock as a teena and now is an artist of many talents including cartoonist, film director, and wood engraver. His art defines the aesthetics of most of the group’s album covers. Marcelo Cabral’s influences comes from a mixture of skate culture – he has been a strong figure of the scene in the early 1990s – the formal study of Jazz, and a special taste for improvisation. Juçara Marçal traveled around the country with the band A Barca to collect folk and ritual songs. Thiago França comes from the traditional world of the Conservatory. It was a world in which he did not fit and from which he ran away to deep dive into free-jazz and improvised music, but without forgetting what he called himself  “that melancholic tone.”

Together, these artists have created a striking sonic signature, once acoustic and now electric, but still unpredictable, avoiding the paths they’ve already taken. Each album is a new step in this torto, askew trail, whether it is instrumental with Thiago França as a leader of various combos such as Sambanzo, MarginalS, A Espetacular Charanga do França, or it is very personal like Rodrigo Campos’ albums whose lyrics, concise as haikus, tell tales of death and cruelty in a whisper. New partners are always welcome though! Thus Vicente Barreto – who started his career in São Paulo accompanying Tom Zé on Estudando o Samba (1976) – entered the new “Deconstruction scene” with his latest record Cambaco (2015) produced by Cabral and the featuring the whole team.

What makes their music so unique is the feeling that it grows like an improvised conversation, around a main theme, while Cabral’s bass stand as a pillar, instruments intertwine to begin a dialogue between Kiko’s guitar, Rodrigo’s cavaquinho, and Thiago's saxophone. Each with Juçara’s voice, both soulfully expressive and pitch perfect, floating clear and strong on top of the band's tense noise. They all have much to say but always leave space and listen to one another.

Metá Metá, Juçara, Kiko and Thiago bring another dimension to their music, a spiritual one. It is not only a dialogue, it's also a call. They play afrobeat, or afropunk or whatever you may call it, but that is not a hollow shell filled with killer grooves, it is a trance of distortion or an apollonian prayer inspired by the orixás, the gods of candomblé.

— Olivier Cathus • Afro-Sambas.fr