MythsEnt

Letra Viva Matriz, R. Luís de Camões, 10 - Centro, Rio de Janeiro - RJ, 20051-020, Brazil The majority of the records purchased from Letra Viva Matriz I bought in 2024. Once a week I would travel between Barra and Catete, a journey cut to just under an hour by a motorbike and its technically, ethically and wilfully gifted driver that would ensure I would reach my in-person therapy in time. The very first time I walked out of therapy and through the many gates of the building onto the street I briefly walked through the market and found myself on a street corner outside of a McDonalds on route to Largo Do Machado. Here I ordered an ubermoto (uber motorbike) to the Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading, I had never been and my listless nature disposed me to indulge as a tourist, to bathe in the technicolour of its dome ceiling. In the midst of a usually chaotic journey my driver sounded his horn as we went past the back of a warehouse very near to where he had picked me up, but down an unusual back street. The following week I did the same journey, left the building and got picked up by a motorcyclist on the same corner, yet as I looked at the bike and at the driver I had an uncanny feeling that he was the same guy from the week before, almost the exact same time, same location and once again going to the Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading, this time I intended on doing some work in the library as I had seen there were some spaces the previous week, although I eventually found it slightly too grand to actually study in. I let go of the thought as if to negate some strange deja vu feeling and I accepted it. This was until he turned into the unusual and memorable street, sounded his horn and was greeted by the same wave in the same place from the same person, ultimately at roughly a similar moment in the day, given that my therapy was at the same time and my walking pace had probably not drifted from the original day. I continued to pursue this coincidence, and developed a rhythm for going to the centre after my weekly meeting in Catete. Each time after the Royal Portuguese Reading Cabinet I would go Letra Viva, dig through the records that they would have put out that week. I encountered each of these records throughout 2024, returning to Letra Viva Matriz in 2026 to continue looking through their abstract collections, having developed a fond relationship to their store.

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Discomania, R. Augusta, 560 - Consolação, São Paulo - SP, 01304-000, Brazil

A record store that friends and I stumbled across heading to MASP. The clerk spent his time lamenting the state of the world and the state of the record re-selling business. He spoke of his multiple shops and claimed that he has probably single handedly sold and owned more records than anyone in Brasil across an average of time.

The point of departure for this initial selection of music is at my root. I have always had an impulse to unravel and unfurl phenomena that I witness or experience and I see this happening with my own collection of records, reflecting my own navigation of my Brazilian identity an attempt to return to the base, what better place to see as the beginning or the inauguration of a space. In the music I was seeking a sort of maximalism that is birthed from the minimalism. Base level percussive bodily acts that posits the latency of percussive instrumentation, the voice and the body sounds as it reacts to the environment, the land and the people that occupy it, and how they occupy it, music birthed out of ceremony, practice and dialogue. Crossroads and thresholds.

Brazil is not held in the music itself but the act of the music. Acts of evasion, decontextualising, dissolution, as a process of colluding and hacking, forming expression out of nebulous cultural matter. |