Encyclopedia of Arto

A founding member of seminal New York ‘no wave’ band DNA and long a guitar-shredding pivot of New York's downtown avant-garde, Arto Lindsay has also, like his contemporary David Byrne, been a somewhat unlikely conduit for Brazilian music for several decades. It's perhaps no coincidence, given his recent contributions to Lucas Santtana's Sem Nostalgia, that the most compelling moment on this drowsy anthology is ‘Combustível’, a driving, surdo and djembé-pounding dance-floor monster co-penned with Santtana and longtime collaborator, bassist Melvin Gibbs. It's also the most atypical moment: much of Arto Lindsay's later work, or at least mid-90s to mid-2000s music included here, is far more subtle. Consistently sinuous, understated and experimental, it echoes vintage bossa nova even as it prefigures younger innovators like Santtana, and while many of the English language songs in particular, are only tangentially Brazilian in flavour, that cross-pollination is always palpable.

The second CD is a stark exercise in contrast, throwing Lindsay's slight vocals and guitar-curdling noise pedigree into abrasive relief through a series of unreleased live versions of some of the same songs, as well as Prince's ‘Erotic City,’ Al Green's ‘Simply Beautiful’ and Chico Buarque's ‘Estação Derradeira’ – all performed as you’ve never quite heard them before.