your greedbagArto Lindsay
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from punk jazz to global pop... profile written september 1998:Discussions about the global in music veer from the impenetrable to the preposterous. A decade on from the spurious, marketing-led invention of "world music", the term generally conjures up the very worst kind of culturally-ignorant/arrogant, dumbed-down, anodyne, rootless hybrid; a music to appeal to the re-invented hippy, to whom the conceits born of market research appeal more than the true, disorientating culture-clash of Bollywood and Manga soundtracks, J-Pop and Brazilian death-core, Latin easy listening and Delhi bottleneck ragas.
The music one-time NYC downtowner noisenik and guitar-abuser Arto Lindsay has been making over the last two years is in line with these real acts of cross-fertilisation, a music that intuitively grapples with the real dirt of distinct musical cultures before finding which of their elements really blend. It's something at which Arto's music has hinted in the past. His barked vocals and scratchy improv guitar playing had already made him something of a star of the New York post-punk and No-Wave scenes, a ready and able ally and associate for, among others, John Zorn, Anton Fier's Golden Palominos, Bill Laswell's Material and The Lounge Lizards, but it was the group he himself formed with keyboardist and programmer Peter Scherer, the Ambitious Lovers, that first indicated the ease with which he could mix musics, not as an act of post-modern knowingness, but rather with absolute joy. The Ambitious Lovers' three albums Envy, Greed, and Lust were among the pop masterpieces of the 80s, bringing together the Brazilian music of Lindsay's youth with fierce New York funk; they represented a pairing of intelligence and glamour rare this side of Scritti Politti. Commercially, of course, they were completely unsuccessful.
It's too early to say if the series of albums Arto embarked upon with 1996's The Subtle Body, and which continues this Spring with the release of Noon Chill, will bring him the wider recognition that the Ambitious Lovers should have. For all its precedents in its creator's previous work Subtle Body felt like it came out of the blue. It presented a set of songs co-composed by Arto and some of his long-term colleagues, among them fellow genre-busters Bill Frisell and Ryuichi Sakamoto and Brazilian tropicalismo star Caetono Veloso, with whom Arto had worked as a producer (indeed, his involvement, as producer, with Brazilian pop performers - Veloso and the sadly neglected Marisa Monte - seems to have had a strong influence on Subtle Body generally). But the real highlights of the album were the songs Arto co-composed with the Brazilian singer-songwriter Vinicius Cantuaria, as they unearthed an astounding new talent. A year later, Cantuaria would go on to release his debut album, Sol Na Cara, a record full of the grace for which Brazilian pop, from Bossa Nova to tropicalista, justly famous: the album of 1997, for this writer.
Arto's next album, last year's Mundo Civilizado saw Subtle Body's ideas taken a step further. It too featured material written by Arto, Cantuaria and Sakamoto, as well as exceptionally fine covers of Al Green's "Simply Beautiful" and Prince's "Erotic City", and the album's mood was, once again, one of graceful fragility perched on the edge of violence. But it was moving elsewhere, too, Subtle Body's delicate percussion and deft guitar supplemented with Peter Scherer's rhythm programming and the New York Illbient scene's somewhat notorious DJ Spooky's sample manipulation. It could all so easily have spoiled the music's balance, yet the album was unquestionably a step forward.
An accompanying album of remixes, Hyper Civilizado, suggested how far Arto was prepared to take this approach, and Noon Chill confirms that he's willing to let the inevitable logic of what Simon Reynolds has coined "sampladelia" get under the skin of all his music. The album is produced by Arto and Andres Levin, who co-produced Mundo Civilizado, and uses many of the musician that have graced the previous two albums: bassist Melvin Gibbs, percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Vinicius Cantuaria, as well as the considerable talents of the Persian-American singer Sussan Deyhim. And again it features songs written by Lindsay with some of the album's contributors.
Yet this time out, the inherent darkness of the music is brought closer to the surface. Arto's fragile voice, the slight melodies, the abstract lyrics and the gentle, looped Brazilian rhythms remain, but as this album moves closer towards a fuller integration with electronic textures and beats, the mood is more stifling. A limited edition comes with an EP of remixes, Reentry. That these mixes don't stand out against their originals as much as Hyper Civilizado's did is an indication of where this music has moved.
We daren't hope that Arto continues to produce music as good as that on these four albums; we can certainly say with confidence that it's unlikely many releases in 1998 will be as fine as Noon Chill.
links
- http://www.artolindsay.com (official)