The Wayback: Following the Tracks of a Brazilian Visionary

PRISCILLA ERMEL

PRISCILLA ERMEL

Origens Da Luz (music from the 1980s and 1990s)

Music from Memory

The Pitchfork review tags this compilation as “Experimental.” Other sites locate it as “Ethnographic” music, or that endlessly imprecise catchall “World” music.

These terms barely reach the front steps of Priscilla Ermel’s intensely rhythmic, ritual-haunted, intricately textured sonic imagination. In Ermel’s rendering, folkloric elements ride side by side with the clicky-whirr of the electronic future. “Meditation” happens inside thundering triple-meter grooves for dancing — and also on the yoga mat, where thick analog-synth drones provide the backdrop. Sometimes Ermel sounds urban, sometimes she offers lamenting sounds from deep inside impenetrable forests that are presently under existential siege.

Ermel, a cellist and composer, lived and collaborated with indigenous populations in the Amazon and elsewhere in the Brazil interior. She spent years understanding the sounds and chants these people handed down for generations, and then more years reconciling them against the sweetness of Brazilian pop.

Her work starts from recognition that the country’s cosmopolitan stars (like, say, Chico Buarque) and the most remote tribes share common roots — everything from specific tones to chant cadences. From there, Ermel builds vast spaces that can resemble those in ambient music. She enriches these with broad, lamenting melodies and rattling, assymetrical pulses that every so often skip beats in unpredictable ways. There are sweetly cinematic shadow dances. There are forays into whimsical art-project dungeons. There are pedal-point guitar ostinatos that resemble Laurel Canyon idylls.

And though this collection offers a range of approaches and song types, its collisions never feel even remotely like collisions — more like spiritual journeys, expeditions to healing destinations. At first, the juxtaposition of the single-string berimbau against harp and cello on “Martim Pescador” might seem exotic; the sounds intertwine as the piece unfolds, creating an atmosphere that feels somber, transformative, shamanistic. Why not just file it under that?

Key Tracks: “Campo de Sonhos,” “Martim Pescador.”

Related: Various Artists: Outro Tempo II — Electronic And Contemporary Music from Brazil, 1984–1996.