(Free translation of a Press Release by Antonio Cicero & Waly Salomao)




Heat. Everything throbs. What could be such a distinguished and propelling flame on Adriana Calcanhotto’s CANTADA? Who would know? Perhaps the will and the capability of maintaining a lit experimental vein. Not on the alternative verges, but, precisely, in the mainstream of the commercial pop music. And she does it through the least obvious ways: the intentional diminution of harmonies, on behalf of a minimized and playful song-book, and for the promise of happiness, through the approach able to seduce to her project musicians/songwriters, who help her accomplish it.



She confessed she has chosen them, for not being musicians-employees, but creators who, oriented by the law of desire, are able to penetrate territories not entirely mapped yet. Outsiders, they find themselves aside from the industry, which allows them to be more surprising and funny. "It’s the group I mostly identify myself with". Moreno Mais Dois, Los Hermanos, Bossacucanova make a fearless and uncommitted use of top technology: yes, it’s cybernetics; serving balance, however; with no fetish or imitations of imported stereotypes. A seasoning is added by Daniel Jobim when he slides over the songs’ surfaces.



Adriana Calcanhotto’s attractive differential is this combined and daring art of incorporating cultural dissonance to her work, to the point of emphasizing their conflicts, cracks and gaps, instead of trying to harmonize them. As a DJ, she scratches and samples sonorities recognizable to the commercial and erudite music, to the canonical poetry and lyric clichés interspersed with suggestions of humming musical phrases. Not by chance, "SE TUDO PODE ACONTECER" fits as a hymn to the fecundity of fortuity. This is the way her bitter-sweet new style of seduction germinates. It refers to a refusal of the conventional fusion, shredded bed-spreads, and the blistered hick-cosmopolitan "polenta". Let’s eat Madonna? The invitation to eat Madonna’s boogie-woogie (MUSIC/IMPRESSIVE INSTANT), results in the "Adrianized" Madonna bomb-shell.



Here is a deliberately sloping program, incorporating bright-darks, impure arrangements, ready-mades explorations, nearly-technos, songs for the dance floor, remarkable instants, decisive moments, maximum in-securities, and expertise on the manipulation of oscillating identities between "SOU SEU" and "SOU SUA". Calcanhotto travels among the audience and the nuances of intimacy. A diagonal reading of the Yellow Pages of "JORNAL DE SERVIÇO", by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, is an apogee in this celebration. This way, songs to awaken men (and women) and put kids to sleep ("NINA"), are thrown into the air.



We are proud to make part of this troupe. How could dedicated poets prevent from Adriana Calcanhotto’s such seductive approach?