Ultimately, patience works. It took me about three month to complete the download of this file from the ED2K network!
How come this lossless jewel of great appeal has been kept so completely hidden?
Let me bring it back to the light In Times Like These...!!!
This review is from: Transa
This record is a masterpiece of tropicalia music. The Context: The tropicalia poet has been sent into exile in London by the forces of repression and artistic control in Brasil.London, 1970: at the height of hippie culture. Surrounded by the sounds of 1960's British rock, the harsh noise of the English language, with the warmth of tropical Brasil and the soft Portuguese language only dreams and memories in a primitive, neolithic, rock-dominated nightmare of exile. He wakes up in the morning, singing an old Beatles song. It is a long way back to his homeland.
At home, in Brasil, the Poet is a star. In England he is a just a long-haired South American man with a guitar and a funny accent. He hears his voice among others... just a common man. His presence in London goes unnoticed. ... "You don't know me..." he says and "You won't see me." He feels anonymous and the feeling pervades these songs.
He has no idea when or if he will ever be allowed to return to his homeland. He might as well learn to play rock chords and sing in English. But it is awkward. He cannot take the hippies or the rock-&-rollers completely serious. He is an outsider to their ideas and life style. He mocks them: "You sing about waking up in the morning but your never up before noon!"
And he cannot escape his memory and his language. Bits of Portuguese surface up from his subconscious, even as he struggles to sing and write in this new, rhyme-less language. Verses in Portuguese force themselves into his English songs. The sound of cuicas and bossa nova chords intervene, even as he tries to play his guitar in the English style. But the sounds of Brasil, and the sounds of Portuguese words, come across as hallucinations, chunks of dream, trance-inducing (trance, a play on words on the title "transa", which is itself a word full of sexual, sensuous overtones).
The Poet goes into the streets of London. He walks down the street and hears a tropical sound: but it is just reggae, not the samba and bossa nova sound of his home land. He remembers a lesson from his days as a school boy, another poet 300 years his elder, Gregorio de Mattos, whose outrageous art earned him the nickname "Hell Mouth" and earned him an exile in Angola. "Triste Bahia" becomes a sort of seance, a dialogue of exiled poet to exiled poet, across the cosmos and the centuries, a communion of language and rhythms that evoke a homeland, Bahia, from which they have both been expelled.
So much for the context, now for the music. It is amazing how dreamy it is while maintaining a bare, minimalist production. No lush tracks recorded one on top of the next. Just a man, a microphone, an acoustic guitar, some background percussionists, and a bassist. If you close your eyes it almost sounds like you are in the sound studio with Caetano as he plays. And how he plays! Every one of these tracks is an amazing typically tropicalia journey to the limits of the accepted, conventional norms of mainstream music. Each starts off soft and conventional, and then builds, builds, repeats, repeats, until finally you are overwhelmed with the absolute force of the noise coming out of your speakers. And then silence. And typically a return to the beginning again."
I proudly introduce the majestic Transa , who's fame has crossed all frontiers and made Caetano Veloso an influential figure of his time.
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| 1972 - TRANSA |
INEVITABLE!
