Arto Lindsay
Mundo Civilizado

Arto Lindsay was part of the movement that swept through New York during the pre-punk era of 1978. He was born artistically with John Lurie, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, Allen Ginsberg, and others. He was the supportive and innovative spirit behind Sonic Youth and Blonde Redhead, he was the founder of DNA and Ambitious Lovers, and, not least, a producer for Caetano Veloso and David Byrne. But the "behind the scenes" activity was a bit restrictive for him and so, after the release of the breakthrough album "O corpo sutil" in 1996, Arto presented to the press (the following year) the successor to that path just sketched with the previous album: the record was titled "Mundo Civilizado" and was a real musical shock for the very idea of contamination that characterized its most significant tracks. With this record, Arto indeed combined thesonic extremism of Sonic Youth's experiences with the seductive ambiguity of bossa nova and thus found the winning idea to make this album the reference point for an entire generation of musicians at the end of the 90s. The musician's new sonic explorations on Brazilian music and its derivatives moved between melody and rhythm, sweetness and acidity in a continuous swing between that rhythmic and sensual world of his native Brazilian land and the more nervous and metropolitan one of his newly acquired residence: New York. He says about himself: "I was born and raised in Brazil in the 60s, with the idea that pop music, among other things, had to spread information and change people's consciousness. Brazilian pop music was very open to other musical styles at the time because Brazil was beside everything, not in the middle of it. TV arrived and matured a new generation. People loved all kinds of music, from the Beatles to Brazilian folk music to John Cage's avant-garde and the serial music of 20th-century classical expression." In short, it's what one would call an eclectic album that makes contrast its strong point: from the utmost sweetness sung over electro-noise bases of "Complicity" to the strange noise samba of "Q-samba," from the almost electro-ambient track "Simply Beautiful" to the Brazilian-trip-hop experiments of "Mundo Civilizado" in a continuous invention ability that oscillates between these extremes with enviable naturalness (note the transition from the almost classical opening to Bjork-style trip-hop of "Horizontal"), only to succumb to songs full of pathos and melody ("Mar da Gavea") played with voice and guitar without frills or electronic contraptions. Unmatched when the tracks are colored with light and impalpable electronics with magnetic loops of a piano that could be played by a Craig Armstrong in a state of grace ("Imbassal"). A beautiful album, and all in all not "so experimental" and groundbreaking as it might seem given the initial premises, but it was still 1997, and since then, many strides towards more uninhibited contamination have been made, not a few. So much so that Lindsay's later works (the latest "Invoke" is from this year) will also be more excessive and electrified, leaning more towards the "metropolitan" side, moving further away from the native sweet saudade, still strongly present here.