As a preface, I’ve long felt that music and musicians were better served by print media than digital, bearing in mind that my experience of print media included zines. I’ve considered doing a zine but the truth is that I’m a musician and not a writer, and whenever I start to write something I have a nagging, guilty feeling that I should work on music instead. That said, there’s room in life for detours if the detours are positive, and I know that independent, living musicians can always benefit from someone taking the time to respond to their work, and the type of brief posts that social media engenders don’t do music and musicians justice. So, here’s something about Luiza Brina’s “Prece.”
I heard “Oração 17 (risco)” on an NTS Radio show and as has become an intermittent habit, I made a quick search, found the album, and nearly immediately bought it.
I have a pet theory that at least for US popular music culture, subject to disagreement, that the last truly great musician who combined top-level commercial success with not only artistic integrity but artistic innovation, whatever that means, was Prince. He arrived at the tail-end of a music industry that had began and grown by casting its net widely: lots of small labels, regional and local labels, finding musicians and pressing records. The big hits paid for the merely adequate sellers and covered the losses as they happened. Things consolidated, and increasingly the companies put effort into cultivating massive hits on established models. Likely, this was sensible business but it meant was that as music increasingly became product (and worse, with the internet, “content”), music that did not follow an established model became a commercial liability. That is to say, the more unique the music, the greater the commercial liability, at least from the vantage point of large commercial labels, increasingly as time passed themselves assets in larger corporations.
A massive casualty in this process has been melody. For whatever reason, I have this feeling that a real melody, difficult to define precisely, has some kind of living presence, like a unique being. Some unique beings are simple, and some complex, and with a complex being, to simplify it is to kill it. Its complexity just needs to be accepted, because it’s what makes it unique, and as something unique, beautiful. I’m happy if any musician has massive success, and the current crop of truly big performers seems like they’re largely on the side of whatever is good and right in the world. But I haven’t heard someone working at that level who made me think, “now there is a real melodist” since probably D’Angelo, and he seems to have slipped in to that level somewhat by accident.
All this is to say that among other things Luiza Brina is what I would call a real melodist. The various musical traditions in Brazil surely encourage this, and I also imagine that musicians outside the Anglosphere are insulated from some of the musical constriction the industry places on actual musicians. There are a couple pieces on “Prece” that function as introductory or transition pieces, but broadly speaking each track on the record is a living, breathing being, identifiable through its unique melody like a person can be identified by her or his face or voice.
I can’t give a higher compliment to a musician than this. Why did I get drawn to music as a kid and stay with it for the rest of my life, which is hopefully in its middle, its early middle better yet? Because like so many musicians, I encountered a piece of music, mostly but not entirely in song form, as a friend or companion. I had a sense that there was not only something but someone there. I still get that feeling, and that feeling is what makes the deep experience of music inexplicable.
Needless to say, melody is one aspect of music that some musicians lean into and others don’t, and Brina is in command of her music as a whole. I have no idea what the budget for the project was but it feels like a proper record from the good old days, the likes of which were recorded with real musicians in the Capitol Records building back in the day, though with a skillful use of electronics that obviously is new. My point is the feeling: “Prece” feels real, and it’s a sign of Brina’s command of her process that it does.
From what I can see, Brina’s been making music independently for years, and indeed one of the things on her Bandcamp clearly has a cassette cover. There’s a link to a website, which appears to be down, regrettably. I found her stuff about six months too late, because I would definitely have gone to her L.A. show last year had I known her music.
I recently got to see Werner Herzog take questions at the Egyptian Theater here after a screening of “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser,” and in response to a foolishly-phrased question about the supposed death of cinema, Herzog pointed out that cinema is far from dead if you look at the world as a whole and include independent filmmakers. What is crucial, Herzog said, is for those of us who love cinema to concretely patronize cinema. Go to the movies, go out to the movies. If a movie you want to see is playing, go see it. The problem, he stressed, is not a lack of worthwhile films. The same obviously applies to music.