Pedroso & Pedrosa are a singer-songwriter duo who hail from Brazil, Paraná and Rio de Janeiro respectively. “No Bico do Corvo” is a southern Brazilian expression that translates to “In The Beak Of The Crow”. I will do my best as I was never exposed to Brazilian Portuguese. But, I do have Spanish and Sicilian so, my translations should be fun. Please forgive me.
No Bico do Corvo opens to the winding of a clock. The use of the spiritual hearkens back to a communal memory that so many share and do not want, soaked in sarcasm as if to say, “You are already flying away…does this even matter anymore?”
Temporal shambles darkly with a grinding, rusted beat and atonal Einstürzende Neubauten vocals. Unruh and Blixa would be proud and grooving. A tribal drone. Rubs my dark side with a occult caress. Like foreplay while a subject of bondage, each nerve stimulated in glorious torture. Carry me in your beak anytime.
Caballo drops us into a deep submersion into the plains of the threshold of here and after-here. Flows in texture from ethereal to space-age forgotten tech, I had no idea where this midnight black wing was going to fly me but, I knew it was headed towards my favorite ghost town of No Place Special.
It is called a “change-over” in film editing where the audience is aware time is changing speed but has no idea of duration or at what rate. Oliverlúdio made me feel as if I was an observer through the samples to see a scene of exploration while the mundane continued all around. Our clock tolls eight and sends us to five but, never worry about the hour, listener. Time is an invention the cosmos ignores.
The exquisite mixes of all the samples in Manda-Bala – Podescrêr with our faithful poet narrators sing sending bullets until a rooster crows. Believe. Sub-Angústia allows you to feel what lurks below suffering in less than a minute and a half. Trambolho has our clock return as a motif, mixed into a blitter candy store calliope dream to remind us of our journey within the beak of our host. I adore the changes of textures that the duo uses.
Chora Monte (Anti-Lenha) is a weeping hill? A mountain of tears? With anti-firewood? Our climb begins slowly with an almost Theremin incantation. A childhood xylophone, drum and voice play with a lullaby and a nightmare.
O Russo strikes six and then is rewound while a tide of voices and cello fly over a river we all have heard about. A raven has stolen the ferryman’s transport. I could be adrift in a boat to this song until we both fade into the mists of time.
Um Dia Ido may be a day gone. But, when you leave this container, you become light. That is what the raven carries, kept safe upon it’s tongue. Light has no constraints of time, at it’s speed. What seems to the passenger that a day has passed, a thousand years will have risen and fallen all within those beats of wings taking you to your final destination. Nós não entendemos Patavinas may be a misunderstanding, or it may be the band playing as the crow lands in No Place Special.
Pedroso & Pedrosa are masterfully free as they grapple with grief, loss and our unique moment of space and time. Their experiments with recording and songwriting are a brilliant hypothesis, begging to be repeated. I hope to hear more from them in the near future.
Proceeds from tapes go to Intituto Zág (Zág Institute) – The zág or Araucaria as it is more widely known, is a native tree from south of Brazil that is sacred to a lot of indigenous tribes, such as the Laklãnõ Xokleng which has as one of the bases of their culture, the sacred ritual that involves Zág seeds and planting them in the correct way, the way it was originally planted ages ago.
www.instagram.com/institutozag/
benfeitoria.com/projeto/vamos-plantar-araucarias-juntos-11ih
“No Bico do Corvo” is out now on Bandcamp. 75% of digital proceeds on Bandcamp go to Pedroso & Pedrosa and the other 25% supports Grimalkin‘s future releases.