Our friend and colleague George Christian Vilela Pereira has released an album that I could only describe as mellow strumming psychedelic noise with elements of Krautrock and instrumental psych that one could have found in Japan in the late 70s and early 80s. The lo-fi feel of the recording adds to the hazy pleasantness of this album.
According to George Christian’s notes, this is a paean to the African influence in Brazil and on his music. He explains it clearly here:
This album came up with a basic motivation in mind: to show how much Africa there is in my musical formation for my guitar experimentation. And with that, I wanted to connect myself with symbols that identified inspirations from African culture based on my Afro-Brazilian status, being from Bahia, Northeastern and also Afro-descendant Latin American. I did not want to think of Afro-Brazillity from a too traditional perspective. I wanted to dialogue with experimental diasporic sounds, or from today’s Africa itself: Tuareg blues, Jamaican dub, Afrofuturism and Arab experimental music were my starting points. I had as journey partners César Blax Costa and Edmar Silva in alchemical tracks, which choose percussion as an improvisational center. “África em Mim” is an album that wants to invoke the struggle of capoeira (with the touch of the iúna learned directly from Mestre Nenel), to pass through allegorical territories of diasporic listening until reaching the universe, astrology, science. There is no freedom without a fight. And “África em Mim” is an invocation to the struggle, rethinking ancestry through the future.
He is among a group of composers whose every work I have enjoyed listening to.
