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Europe Jazz Network
MUSICIANS
ARTO LINDSAY
singer, guitarist
Official website: www.artolindsay.com
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"Because I was a teenager in Brazil in the
'60s, I thought it was part of the purpose of pop music
to change people's consciousness and spread information.
In the '60s, Brazilian pop was aware of many other
styles. Brazil was to the side, not in the middle of
everything. People loved all kinds of music - from the
Beatles and the Rolling Stones to Brazilian folk to avant
garde music like John Cage to serialism to 20th century
classical music." 
An American who grew up in Brazil during the heyday of that country's pointedly eclectic Tropicália movement of the 1960s, Arto Lindsay has made a lifelong habit of crossing borders, musically as well as geographically. From his late '70s work with noise architects DNA through his series of bossa nova-influenced albums in the late '90s, Lindsay has fused rhythms, melodies, and verbal expressions from several cultures and genres in provocative new ways, crafting inimitable soundscapes whose impact can range from fragile pop pleasure to sheer sonic assault. His collaborators are literally all over the map: German theater director Heiner Muller, Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, American multidisciplinary artist Vito Acconci, British producer/conceptualist Brian Eno. It was Eno who included several DNA tracks on the notorious 1978 four-band sampler No New York, which first brought international (albeit underground) attention to Lindsay and his cohorts. Critic Lester Bangs admiringly described the trio's screamed vocals and speaker-shredding guitar as "horrible noise", and the group's influence can be heard in the work of Sonic Youth, DJ Spooky, and countless young rock experimentalists of the next two decades. While few listeners noticed at the time, Lindsay and his bandmates were already inserting Portuguese phrases in their lyrics and alluding to Brazilian drumming patterns, "but it was all so garbled nobody could really tell," he recalled nearly 20 years later in a Pulse! Magazine interview. Lindsay remained a key figure in the looseknit downtown Manhattan cultural scene throughout the 1980s, playing with the Lounge Lizards and the Golden Palominos, producing tracks for performance artist Laurie Anderson, collaborating with John Zorn, contributing lyric translations to several compilations of Brazilian music on David Byrne's label Luaka Bop, even making a cameo appearance in director Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan. With keyboardist Peter Scherer he founded the Ambitious Lovers, recording three albums (Lust, Greed, and Envy) in which, Lindsay now says, "we tried to put it all together; by the mid-to-late '80s we were trying to incorporate Brazilian, experimental, funk, R&B, and soul styles in our music. We were intentionally trying to write some catchy pop songs, because we've always loved catchy pop music." In the 1990s, Lindsay's critical reputation earned him the opportunity to work with many of the figures who first influenced him as a teenager; he has produced recordings by Tropicália giants Caetano Veloso, Vinicius Cantuária, Gal Costa, and Carlinhos Brown (in addition to third-generation Tropicalista Marisa Monte and one of Byrne's solo releases), and has cowritten songs with Veloso and Cantuária. A 1999 New York Times article on the legacy of the Tropicália movement hailed these works as "the finest Brazilian pop albums of the past dozen years." During the same period, Lindsay embarked on a series of solo releases - O Corpo Sutil/The Subtle Body, Mundo Civilizado, Noon Chill, and the new album Prize - in which he continues to explore bossa nova and samba song structures on his own terms. Meanwhile, the edgier guitar style which earned him notice in the early part of his career lives on, as evidenced by the album Aggregates 1-25 (Knitting Factory Works, 1995) and a hidden track at the end of Noon Chill, as well as concert appearances in New York, Europe, and Japan. On yet a third front, Lindsay has invited a variety of younger artists, many of them drawn from New York's "illbient" scene (including DJ Spooky, DJ Soul Slinger, and Sub Dub) to "wreck", "recycle", and "rebottle" songs from his recent solo albums on accompanying remix discs, thus passing along the tradition of constant musical reinvention from one generation to the next. Biography courtesy of Righteous Babe Records DISCOGRAPHY Solo Records
Ambitious Lovers
Arto Lindsay and DJ Spooky: Form and
Function (10'') - Manifold Records
PRODUCER CREDITS
DIRECTOR CREDITS
ACTOR CREDITS
LYRICS FOR:
TEXTS FOR JOHN ZORN
Discographical information courtesy of Music
and Art Management European management: Saudades Tourneen
(Austria) |