lugar alto

The term cruising refers to the practice of seeking and obtaining instant, no-strings-attached sexual gratification with strangers. Akira Umeda was well-acquainted with this term, but his practice of it was not restricted to the aforementioned context. Rather it extended into all spheres of his life and work. A historian by training, he later became a ceramicist, a photographer, a visual artist, a draftsman, a graphic designer, a DJ, a musician, an audio technician, a writer, a researcher... He made forays into a myriad of artistic and academic fields – with a single intention: to achieve a specific objective and promptly exit stage left, as it were. Restless, and easily bored, Akira moved seamlessly from one activity to another – he was a little bit of everything (and nothing at all). Such people usually go unnoticed and unrecognized, something which Umeda found perfectly acceptable. Nevertheless, unlike most people, he had no right to see himself in this light – in the light of ephemerality and anonymity –, for in everything he tried his hand at, he inevitably left an impressive and distinctive mark. In this album, Akira Umeda mixes 42 recordings, dated between 1988 and 2018, which, in a sense, reflect the incredible range of his creative work: from songs, to ambient music; from field recordings to prank calls. The cassette tapes, whose contents make up this double-LP, had been stored in Umeda’s house in São José dos Campos, in São Paulo, Brazil.

Known for his viral video series “Sexta dos Crias”, Ramon Sucesso is a virtuosic DJ who crushes, reimagines and rearranges songs to such a degree that the original tracks become virtually unrecognizable. He has turned his controller into a particle accelerator, creating firework-like bursts of classic funk carioca samples, his own productions, mainstream tracks, nonsense TikTok sound bites, and tons of his trademark beat bolha. All contained within an unparalleled, mischievously non-linear rhythmic flow. Ramon’s social network profiles are as outrageously unpredictable as his mixes. He posts interactive emoji games, bountiful fast-food feasts with his family, comments about the Flamengo football team and videos of him playing FIFA. He has a prolifically restless mind, constantly riffing and improvising; he does whatever it takes to get by, to navigate the reality of life in Brazil and overcome the daunting challenges of the music industry. His new album “Sexta dos Crias” is the culmination of Ramon's DJ work. A LP that embodies the newest in funk carioca, a faithful transposition of the bailes to vinyl. And forget copyrights; forget the notion of ownership – you’ll find none of that here. Ramon has unpretentiously ushered in a new age of experimentation for the genre – making a daring and unprecedented foray into a territory where extreme and radical sounds abound.

Espontaneamente se Tenta: Aventuras Sonoras de Djalma Corrêa is an album of deeply exploratory pieces by legendary percussionist and composer Djalma Corrêa. This double-LP set features previously unreleased recordings that cover a wide range of sonic experiments, revealing an unknown side of the prolific and groundbreaking Brazilian artist. Most of the tracks on this album were digitized for the first time – directly from the original tapes – and were compiled in collaboration with Corrêa just before he passed. The result is a wild and unsettling collage that shows us just how original and intense Corrêa could be: from the unorthodox electroacoustic piece Evolução (Para Fita e Filme), which channels ancestral African inspirations to create a sonic cosmogonical narrative, to the proto-mixtape Exemplo de Sintetizadores, in which he transitions from transcendental drones to astral cha-cha-chas. While the compilation might seem disjointed at first listen, it is in fact the most accurate translation or representation of his central concept: spontaneous music. Djalma's relationship with sound was always guided by his fearless approach to listening, and by his audacious and dynamic interaction with both musicians and equipment, which enabled him to work across a wide array of genres: from jazz to completely abstract music, always through a personal DIY ethic. Corrêa developed a strong bond with experimentalist and inventor Walter Smetak, with whom he shared a studio during his formative years at Universidade Federal da Bahia. Suite Contagotas, featured in this collection, is no less than a sonic materialization of that bond: an experiment revolving around dripping water and its randomness – a tentative exploration of the ideas and possibilities envisioned by Smetak for his audacious, albeit unrealized, Estúdio OVO. Djalma, however, is best known for his studio work in historical albums, including many by Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Jorge Ben, and for his own polyrhythmic opus Baiafro. The last track is an early recording called Bossa 2000 dC, first performed by Djalma at the 1964 Nós, Por Exemplo concert, an event which is often cited as marking the beginning of the Tropicalia movement. At the time, he was the only artist in the lineup using electronic devices to create sounds, e.g. medical oscillators and contact mics to augment his percussive palette. The artwork is an amalgamation of material found in the Djalma Corrêa Archive (currently managed by his son Caetano Corrêa) and other material created during the period in which the record was being put together. The intention is to guide the listeners through this possibly tempestuous soundscape, giving them additional resources so that they may draw their own meanings and make their own sense of this extremely immersive and original experience – which is like nothing we've ever heard before.

Is this recording an environmental activist art statement or ambient spa music? Maybe both? The fourth release from São Paulo label Lugar Alto is not a Brazilian production but it still has strong ties to the country, it is the psychotomimetically heuristic ambience of The Dreambird by Mitar Subotić (Suba) & Goran Vejvoda. The album was produced in Paris in 1987 and 5 years later was the first release by Suba in Brazil as a limited edition CD put out by the Brazilian Catholic label Paulinas COMEP. Listening to The Dreambird is a deeply immersive organic experience. It is ambient music that actually integrates with your environment. Bird calls and shrieks intertwining with lush synth tones, imagine late seventies Tangerine Dream in a tropical hothouse while sliding into a floatation tank located in the Amazon, an environment of rich and strange sounds. The Dreambird harks back to a time when environmental recordings were being discovered as forms of music, as David Toop writes in his book Exotica “... some recordists stuck to the idea of birdsong as music, a notion that is surely as old as music itself”. The album was made while Goran Vejvoda was living in Paris. Relaxed days were spent sitting around, tinkering with sounds, going out, having lunch, coming back and playing some more. Pascal Humbert, bass player from the French band Passion Fodder, joined the duo for a day. Goran had a Japanese field recording CD called Bird Island Seychelles that contained the exotic bird sounds and sea waves used to create the organic textures of the album. Suba left with the 8-track tapes and rough mix cassettes and adapted the music for a sound art installation/happening by the Danube in Novi Sad where The Dreambird was played, climaxing with a laser show. In the early nineties Suba moved to Brazil, and together with André Geraissati, was one of the producers of Nina Maika, an album by the Brazilian musician, Edson Natale. The album was recorded at the COMEP studio, renowned at the time for having one of the best audio production structures found in Brazil. Edson and Suba got on well with the studio crew and in 1992 proposed the simultaneous release of Sol de Inverno, an album by Edson Natale and Alex Braga, and The Dreambird. In return, COMEP provided studio hours for them to use on further projects. Suba used these hours for the production of Memória Mundi (otherwise known as Oharaska), an extensive musical project that he worked on with influential percussionist João Parahyba, but which was never finished. From this project the track “A Fábula”, with the participation of the singer Natália Barros, came out on the compilation from the Music From Memory label, Outro Tempo II. According to João, Suba managed to convince the nuns who ran the label that The Dreambird was a recording for meditation, which may have caused him to adapt the name and “conception” of the album, adding another intriguing facet to this production. The Dreambird was actually only known by that name in Brazil as the record was never actually intended to be public. The names of the tracks released back then were different from those used on this release, which are taken from the masters maintained by Vladimir Ivković. Moreover, the tracks released on the CD in Brazil were shortened and only 4 of the 6 original tracks were on the CD. This release contains the 4 tracks released in Brazil in their original full-length form, plus the two never released tracks that are available exclusively in digital format. Included as a bonus are Goran Vejvoda’s liner notes translated into French, German, Serbian and Portuguese. New artwork, with drawings by Arthur Longo, a French snowboarder and artist, was commissioned for the album and was conceived by the design studio Sometimes Always, who have worked with Lugar Alto since their first release. Mitar Subotić aka Rex Illusivii aka Suba, was born in 1961 in Yugoslavia. A renowned innovator in his home country but is best known in Brazil for his 1999 CD São Paulo Confessions, a hugely important release that effortlessly walked the line between modern MPB and 90s electronica, influencing a whole generation of Brazilian music makers. Tragically, he died just after it was released and could never benefit from its critical acclaim and success. The Dreambird was recorded in Paris one year before “In the moon cage”, a similar project using the pseudonym Rex Illusivi. This was a recording of exuberant synth scapes, ambient guitar and Yugoslavian folk which was awarded the International Fund for Promotion of Culture from UNESCO, and included a three-month scholarship to research Afro-Brazilian rhythms in Brazil. The album was released in 2015 by Ivković’s Offen Music. In 1994 Suba resuscitated his Serbian band, Angel’s Breath, with Milan Mladenović, and it became a psychedelic samba-rock project with a line-up of Brazilian musicians including João Parahyba and Fabio Golfetti, there were also contributions from Taciana Barros and, implausibly, eventual soap-opera star, Marisa Orth. Key track “Metak” is an unlikely mix of burundi drumming, post-punk, electronics and samba. “Wayang”, his global music project from 1995, further demonstrated his work with textures, loops and samples, and was recorded in Wah Wah Studios in São Paulo. This was also released by Offen Music in 2018. The prolific producer and music critic Carlos Eduardo Miranda, described Suba’s appeal best when he said “He came from the other side of the world and understood everything about this mess”. A hugely in-demand producer who was about to become a key player in the internationalization of Brazilian music. Goran Vejvoda is a multimedia artist born in London. After studying music in Belgrade he’s believed to be the guiding hand behind important releases from the early eighties Serbian scene. After moving to Paris he became a guitarist in various bands and worked with renowned comics artist Enki Bilal. Goran has released several solo albums in Japan, "Fruit Cloud" and "Harmonie". Other records include "Mikro-Organizmi" with Rambo Amadeus and "What" with ZerOne. Goran’s writing can be found in magazines such as The Wire and Vibrö. He has exhibited his art since 1981 and has performed at Beaubourg and Palais de Tokyo and participated in the exhibition "Off The Record" at the Musée D'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. More recently he has been working on and showing video art that is a reaction to the covid pandemic, as well as the All Sounds Considered film, which explores the state of sound and silence. It’s challenging to trace the story of this project precisely, very little information is available and what we have are diffused fragments of memory from different actors. So, we return to the initial question: what is The Dreambird? It doesn’t matter if it is either an environmental statement or simply relaxing spa music, what it does is evoke sensations that elevate your mind to a higher and more emotional plane and from there you can travel wherever you like.