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March 06, 2006
looney tunes and your ethics
Discoteca Collection Missao De Pesquisas Folcloricas - Chamada Do Aricury
What this song sounded like to me, before I heard it for the first time: a group of people (young and old), gathered near someone's house, sitting on large, smooth stones and small boxes, making a peculiar type of soft, broken weather with their voices. Clapping grass hands. Playing drums whose skins are improbably thick, glossy fronds stretched taught across sharp sapling frames.
Maybe my expectations were a little unreasonable (and weird)- but this song's taken from a set of field recordings made in northern Brazil in 1938 by the Folklore Research Mission, and with that kind of background, it's hard not to get all sorts of wild ideas about what the music will be like.
'Chamada Do Aricury' consists mainly of a simple, sliding melody- sung by a calm, graying voice, and accompanied by light percussion that sounds like the cicadas from Luc Ferrari's 'Presque Rien'. As the song progresses though, it seems as if the performance is augmented by the perfectly timed and eerie contributions of passersby (listen, at about 2:55, to the unexpected blossom of voices that reaches out) as well. The whole thing is wrapped in static and scratches, but it's one of the most sparsely beautiful things I've heard this year.
You can buy "The Discoteca Collection" right here.
Posted by Kevin at March 6, 2006 12:31 AM