Cibelle

GREEN GRASS
DIRECTED BY: GUS GUIMARAES
and ADAMS CARVALHO
LONDON LONDON , DIRECTED BY TOM HAINES :
Cibelle, Barden's Boudoir, London
(Rated 4/ 5 )
By Tim Cumming Tuesday, 8 April 2008
Cibelle is a Brazilian artist who doesn't play "Brazilian" music at all. Her first gigs were on the Sao Paulo club scene at the end of the Nineties, and soon afterwards, she was chosen to record smoky lead vocals for the late Serbian producer Suba's 2001 masterpiece Sao Paulo Confessions, which mixed bossa and electronics to powerful effect.
After the release of her acclaimed debut album in 2003, she upped and moved to London, trailing all sorts of musical ideas in her wake. Her ambitious second album, The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves, was released last summer. When she plays in Brazil now, it's as an "international artist".
Her line-ups and collaborators have chopped and changed. Brazilian producer Apollo and Tunng's Mike Lindsay helped to shape the kitchen-sink electronica on Dried Electric Leaves. While her first group in London featured a Hammond organ, now her band's kit could be packed in hand luggage. Tonight's gig is in a basement bar in Dalston, east London, where Cibelle has based herself in a household of artists and musicians. It's very much a hometown gig on her month-long UK tour.
The audience is packed tight around the little stage as Cibelle and her two bandmates (fellow housemates, apparently) set up. Bits of electronic kit are spread out on an ironing board, and once they're all wired up, Cibelle begins by sinking a high, wavering note into one of two hand-held mics, her distinctive voice sampled and looped on the spot and built up into a giddy choral of vocal patterns rising and dying away. She steps back, smiling and holding up to the same mic a grainy Dictaphone recording of her vocals, which begins repeating and expanding like some kind of musical fractal over the acoustic drum and bass lines while she sings a cappella into another, uninflected mic; it' a brilliantly realised demonstration of vocal prowess and seemingly off-the-cuff mixing.
Her cover of Tom Waits's "Green Grass" is a highlight, its light rain of silvery blues delivered by Cibelle on guitar, while her band comes into its own behind a straight, true vocal. Her songs are full of found sound textures – spoons, coffee cups, sugar cubes, lighters, car keys are all on her instrument list. For audience participation, she has us rattle our change, keys and jewellery while her housemates, including support act Josh Weller, climb up on stage and more or less do the same. Cibelle clearly understands the childlike allure of instant experimentation and diversion, and in an intimate gig like this, it slips in perfectly to what's going on. She doesn't even have to loop it.
INTERVIEW FOR FRENCH TV PROGRAM CARAVAN11 (that probably explains more than my blurb right bellow)
i was born and there was a little issue, an umbilical cord around my neck. the doctor chopped it off and out i went, then one morning when i was five i heard music coming from a house on the way to my school, i asked mother what it was. she said :it's a conservatorie. what's a conservatory , mother? it's where you learn music. i said i want it, she gave it to me.
i took up guitar, then my attention span flipped and picked up piano, then it flipped again and there was percussion, and synth, and pieces of charcoal, and white chawk in the sculpture room where i kissed a boy for the first time when i was nine and he used to play the flute. once i held his hand in music theory class. i still remeber his profile and his cold hands, he must have been twelve , yet he had hair on his fingers , i was nine already.
then i came home to find a green semi-transparent vinyl record containing "born to alive" and the arpegiator on it made me adicted, i wonder how could you do it with a piano instead. eletronic-bionic finger? hair on the boy's fingers.
then i found a benito de paula record, it had samba on it, i thought it was for "old people". but one track before last on the b-side made me cry. i was 10 .
then i wanted to go see technotronic and my mom came with me, i wore royal blue lycra leggings and danced till my mom took me home. i was 13 .
mmmm...
... oh yes, i remember, then, i was playing bad volleyball and singing to sound of kicking balls inside the locker room, raise the ball! hit! strike! broke a finger. cant play piano no more. I was singing in the locker room, eating "fandangos".
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on another note, music, the way i put it in the juicer or splash it on the canvas, is not about mixing this with that, or that with the other, the genre, the country where one was born or where one lives, it is not about being from this or that scene or this box or the next. If it's just me then, when that piece was done, with all i had inside of me at that second until that chapter got closed when the lights of the studio go off, taking up poems and embracing them with sounds in layers and punctuations, water, powder, bricks. Even better, is to sculpt out of a big mass of collected particles of sound, sweat, glue, lick, purple, silver, air, wood, wind, anything thats been stuck together by living life and all these and other things accumulating inside of me just like breathing and the only things remaining being the ones that match me at that moment, then letting them out, all merged inside me by osmosis, letting it all come out, all that, is that mass, that will be sculpted until it gives me goose bumps and butterflies. then i know it's ready.
i am also part of an amazing project together with The Real Tuesday Weld, David Piper and Reality Films . better than having me explain it in words, you can watch this video of the backstage and bits of our peformance at the Tate Modern London, last year, in the Turbine Hall
A paulistana Cibelle Cavalli se inclui na seleta safra de cantoras nacionais que já alcançaram reconhecimento no exterior mas cujo nome ainda é pouco familiar aos ouvidos brasileiros. com endereço em Londres e viajando pelo mundo desde 2002, a bela cantora e compositora é também multi-instrumentista e produtora, característica que se faz notar em seus discos e apresentações. Seu cd de estréia, de 2003, batizado apenas com o próprio nome, foi elogiado pelo jornal britânico ‘The Independent’ como “simultaneamente sem igual na Terra e a tudo o que você já ouviu antes”.A música de Cibelle é reflexo de sua vida nomade ,ela trabalha organicamente com a musica em jam sessions gravadas que depois sao esculpidas no estudio para para tomar o formato de cançao , instpirada pelo produtor Suba, responsável por sua estréia em disco – no projeto ‘São Paulo Confessions’. Cibelle nao se prende a etiquetas sonoras e trabalha independente com a musica sem se prender em sonoridades especificas, utilizando desde instrumetos mais comuns como guitarras e pianos, como qualquer outro objeto ou briquedo , aleatoriamente . Cibelle é tambem colaboradora de artistas plasticos como David Shrigley (escocia) ,Doug Aitken (usa) ,Rick Castro (brasil), e trabalha com musica do ponto de vista de um artista plastico brincando com os sons como se fossem cores e sampleando ao vivo os instrumentos para compor as texturas sonoras, compondo colagens. Cibelle emprestou sua voz doce e cristalina à compilação ‘The new sound of Brazil2’, ao lado de nomes como Bebel Gilberto, Celso Fonseca,Trio Mocotó, Bossacucanova e DJ Dolores, e tambem a compilacao de colaboraçoes com DAvid Shrigley, ao lado de FRanz Ferdinand, Hot Chip, Grizzly Bear, Final Fantasy entre outros. Seu segundo disco de carreira, ‘The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves’, foi lançado no ano passado, e convidada por David Byrne, em fevereiro de 2007 ela se apresentou ao lado de seus amigos e colaboradores Devendra Banhart, CocoRosie, Vetiver, Vashti Bunyan e Adem no mitico Carnegie Hall em NY representando a nova safra da musica mundial.
CIBELLE • "The Shine Of Dried Electric Leaves"
press quotes
"Haunted, cut-up, serenely twinkling electro-acoustic folk-pop… This is my ideal sound and you need to hear it now because then it will be your ideal sound too" (Pop Matters, USA)
"Each song is a joyous little daydream…It's chock full of goodness… Traversing the globe with charming agility, Cibelle gives us one more reason not to roll our eyes at chameleonic songstresses" (Stylus, USA)
"A sophisticated trilingual pop record, spinning twitchy electronics, American freak-folk and Brazilian traditions into a glittering tableau. All the more radiant for their partial construction, Cibelle's songs are marked by a billowing drift, with pliant, meandering melodies and progressions that seem less linear than mutational, evolving toward realization by gradual degrees" (Pitchfork, USA)
"Innovating on old-world beauty. Cibelle crafts tunes that tell stories embellished by an instrumentation that won't disappoint. Her approach to song construction reminds me of The Books and Psapp" (Aurgasm, USA)
"A delightful surprise to those who enjoy their music heady as well as luscious, and with a literate, worldly edge" (All Music Guide, USA)
"She's a canny pop amalgamator, experimenting with soundscapes but never forgetting about tunes… Even when her music is most borderless and surreal, she never sounds disoriented. She navigates with a melodic grace that's purely Brazilian" (The New York Times, USA)
"A playfully trippy excursion full of unexpected twists. She infuses her songs and performances with a sense of discovery" (The Boston Globe, USA)
"She's found the recipe for delicate and tasty music which blend songwriting and cutting-edge wizardry… A rich palette of colours and heady perfumes. Gifted with sensitive and powerful antennaes, she transforms all the informations which she absorbs to create a universal language" (Les Inrockuptibles, France)
"With the delicate fingers of a fairy, she can sculpt a variety of sounds generated by lighters, plastic cups, guitars or Fender Rhodes... Inventive and sensual, she carved 14 tracks which are as many miniature worlds, which reveal more charm and details with each listen" (Elle Magazine, France)
management contact : Claire Feist Management - [email protected]
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