♫♪  Ricardo Dias Gomes - Aa

It begins like you’re in the guts of a pumping station, the rhythmic low pulse of machinery redirecting waste- and floodwater through an infrastructural maze of pipes and channels, aqueducts and canals. The subterranean industrialness of it lends a sort of dank eeriness to it, as sounds drip, skitter, and ping around corners and in unseen alcoves. A voice intones in words you (read: I) cannot understand.

Total movement. Ricardo Dias Gomes surfaces from opener “Precipício” to hurtle through boroughs unexplored, avenues of personal intrigue and design on Aa. His collaborators on the record — Moreno Veloso, Pedro Sá, and, particularly, Arto Lindsay — allow Gomes to expand his palette and dig even deeper into his own psyche, creating mental openings invisible to the solo artist. Gomes hurtles headlong through these openings and into fantasylands of weirdness and disquiet, always willing to shine his creative flashlight into a new corner of inspiration.

And other such silly metaphors.

To throw a blanket description like “minimalist post-punk” over Aa would be reductive, simplifying the record with an unimaginative cliché. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good starting point, so I’m gonna do it anyway. Gomes shifts easily from bass-heavy electroclash to collagist lullabies without thinking too hard about it, blending the disparate parts of his personality into a full picture of unexpected clarity. That’s what’s so engaging about Aa — we get “The Many Moods of Ricardo Dias Gomes” but in the abstract, a whole comprising strangely fitting elements that we all relate to but may not have experienced in quite this way before.

LP available from Kill Shaman Records, purveyor of fine experimental releases — Aa is pretty much right where it belongs.

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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