Pluvial
by Luiz Ser Eu

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led20 I rarely post ANYTHING about music these days, but man, I had to write something down this time. Luiz Ser Eu was by far the best artist I’ve discovered over the last 5 years. Hard to believe this is his first EP. Pure bliss. This is going places. Favorite track: Usar Água do Céu.
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Noturna Primavera 00:00 / 08:30
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1.
Noturna Primavera 08:30
2.
Últimos Passos Celebrados 04:03
3.
Usar Água do Céu 06:04 video
4.
Mergulho 02:05
about
Rio de Janeiro newcomer Luiz Ser Eu joins Phantom Limb for the release of debut EP Pluvial, a fried and inverted Brasilosurrealism, melding tropicofuturist songwriting with concréte-psych and blurred tape collage.

“I wanted to make something that sounded like a white energy sphere,” Luiz Ser Eu writes of his debut EP Pluvial. “Like a mirror of the sea and the sky, but in another realm. A portal.” Inscrutable as this may seem, the music of Pluvial is just as unnerving, fantastical, and disorientingly un/familiar as his description. A changeling to real life, revelling in making the everyday appear abstract. Throughout, Luiz marries exploratory treatments of recogniseable sound sources (guitar, voice, acoustic and programmed percussion, field recordings etc.) with a subverted and wilfully mercurial approach to songcraft that at any moment could flow away on its own unpredictable gravity, its own vessel punctured by noisy sonic artefacts or unexpected interjections of arrhythmia.

Luiz writes that much of his music’s harmonic foundation derives from field recordings, processed into tonal frequencies and used in place of instrumentation. The results are combined with chops informed by MPB classics Os Mutantes and Jupiter Maçã, and the extended-technique irreverence of Arto Lindsay to create headspinning adventures in freaky, mutant, sound-art pop.

Opener “Noturna Primavera” plays like a woozy, half-drugged, moonlit stagger through a haunted bairro, luminous eyes peering out through the darkness. Its psychedelic primitivist guitar is strangled by broken-cable glitching and a disembodied voice fighting to be heard. And yet, like the portal Luiz speaks of, it is transportive. Music from another place. Next, “Últimos Passos Celebrados” rends and tilts like a disintegrating Sung Tong, as boiling gas whistles turn into Hadean birdcalls and joyously manic vocalisations enter like the hallucinations of a nonlingual soapbox preacher. Following, “Usar Água do Céu” is more rhythmic. Beat programming eventually underpins gauzy pads of harmonic fug, having shed the circus hysteria of its opening passage.

“I didn't have any interest in making music in my early life,” Luiz tells us. “As a child I was good at drawing and liked to listen to ambient music, nature, punk rock. And I used to sit down and look into the sun for hours until I started feeling that I was burning, and I thought a lot about everything or didn't think at all. Not for any purpose. I just did it. And then I understood that music is entirely physical, when talking about the sound and its vibrations. That changed my life.” This autodidactic creative hermitude tells us a lot about Luiz’ practice and the threads that led to Pluvial and his forthcoming debut album on Phantom Limb. His work is strange, sometimes challenging, uniquely crafted, and has the power and poetry to stop time.