Monolith Cocktail Blog

EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE 
Words: Dominic Valvona




We are grateful to the assiduous Latin American celebrating hub, publisher and label Sounds and Colours for sending us over an exclusive video from the Brazilian producer and musician Sentidor‘s upcoming collage soundtrack peregrination Am_Par_Sis.  The final haunting pulchritude from that album, released at the end of March, ‘O Pássaro Canta Parecido Com A Música Que Fizemos (The Bird Sings Like The Songs We Made)’ is part of a congruous if challenging futuristic Rio de Janeiro psychogeography remix of sounds and ideas, built around the transformed, cut-up samples and influence of one of Rio’s favourite sons, Tom Jobim, and his post-bossa nova peak experiment Passarim.

Synonymous and celebrated for bringing bossa nova to the world, Jobim’s explorations outside the genre had gone largely unnoticed. Sentidor, the alter ego of Belo Horizonte native and rising experimental music star João Carvalho, has shed new light on Jobim’s innovative experiments whilst also drawing on the drone, ambient, trance, funk carioca, classical and plunderphonics styles to create a uncertain multi-textured augur for future generations to ponder over, or as the press release opines and offers a deeper backstory: ‘It imagines what would happen if Passarim was discovered in a future version of Rio de Janeiro, once the political and social upheavals of the present day have magnified themselves into warfare, leaving the city in ruins. How would Jobim’s record be interpreted by a new generation whose connection with the past and the rest of the world has been cut? How would the record be used in creating new rituals? How can art be reorganized and rebuilt democratically? Without knowing it Sentidor has built on ideas conveyed through John Oswald’s Plunderphonics or Christian Marclay’s Record Without a Cover, questioning what is public domain in the modern world and whether something sacred should be preserved or rather gather dust and slowly turn into something else.’

Regulars to the site will have seen my review of his “revisted” collaboration with native Costa Rican musical ethnologist Nillo (Johnny Gutierrez), SIBÖ, last year, which itself was a transmogrified remix version of the duo’s original field recordings and manipulating production. Here on this latest venture, Sentidor is even more ambitious and creative.

Am_Par_Sis is digitally released by Sounds and Colours on Friday 24th March 2017. Expect to see a full review at a later date. For now enjoy this video premiere teaser.