Critic's evaluation
It is defined as an experience. A fruitful and challenging encounter that resulted in the composition of a new material. Taking the impulse of the creativity deposited in Tradição/Tradução, the Bahian duo Cajupitanga conceived Ensaios Férteis, their second work and first EP.
The birds humming along with the water current and the guitar strumming form the purest recipe of simplicity, softness, and tranquillity. To forget your troubles and delight yourself with the soothing sweetness of the melody may be the main intention for Primeiro De Maio, a song that divides itself freely and openly, through the undulating sound finalizations, between MPB, baião, and pop. The most reliable experimentalism.
A one-sided conversation is heard in the background. Silence. Just as in Primeiro De Maio, the guitar emerges pulling the melody with evident sweetness and delicacy. Evolving into an environment that blends between trap and lounge music, the song gains a curiously ghostly atmosphere from the humming of a bittersweet voice in the background and echoing in such a way as to seem omnipresent. Prata is a song with a mellow base whose lyricism has the clear intention of venerating life from the delight of the rising sun bathing through the open window. The arrival of the new day is the arrival of more life, more opportunities, more promises. Among uncompassionate grooves, flirtations with the rap ambience, and the tinkling of the agogô, Prata continues the already remarkable experimentalism of Cajupitanga.
The overlaps of sharp and sudden guitar riffs give a warm sensibility that accompanies the dawn of the new scenario. Giving way to Arthus Fochi's precise but serene vocals, Mormaço, Arabutã mixes an extremely slow axé cadence with lo-fi, pagode, and samba while talking about romance and the feeling of belonging in a crowd.
A fast and acidic bumbo drum already communicates a subtly more energetic speed. Growing, it is accompanied by occasional insertions of bass that try to soften, in vain, this adrenaline. Trama is another lo-fi product that invites the listener to get intoxicated by its dissonant and enigmatic melody.
Mixing rap with an industrial theme, the melody in construction manages, curiously, to flirt with the equally experimental melody of Voodoo Lady, Live's single. Between subgraves and flirtations with trap, In the Morning matures as the sounding of the hypnotic-embriguing-illusory state between drowsiness and a sense of rationality. The awakening is the separation between the imagistic, abstract, and fantastic with the real. And just as it is the mental mess in the waking process, sonority also embodies this transitional precept.
Dissonances mix elements of axé with olodum while flowing into a sudden state of consciousness and synchronicity provided by samba in union with post-rock. Full of textures, Vira-Terra is a perfect interlude to Sereno, a track of indigenous aroma and texture that transports the listener right into the bosom of nature. Gentle and infectious in its tranquillity, Sereno is built entirely under a transcendental ground that, like a mantra, calms the spirits and puts the spirit-body structure back on track.
Voices blend in between a sudden guitar improvisation. Lá Na Varanda is a new interlude that represents the experience of observing, feeling, and listening to life from above. While the waves of the sea denote movement, the lines suggest life and interaction in an intoxicating ecosystem of such admiring softness.
Asperity and dissonance make the color palette of the picture that is Tardia, a breather chapter that serves as an introduction to O Assalto, a mature-sounding song balanced between its dives between samba and pop. With a broken percussive cadence followed by a hallucinating vocal performance, O Assalto dialogues about the feeling of desolation associated with the need for faith or something to lean on and guarantee motivation.
A low, indecipherable voice spews some incomprehensible words as the melody, in a sudden tidal wave, moves toward something that sounds like an umbandistic mantra. Terreiros Dos Julius returns the previous relaxing and peace with such lightness that it even gives the listener the feeling of a comforting torpor.
Ensaios Férteis is, simply, the cream of experimentalism, of unconcern with popular taste and radio structure. The work of a duo that, with all due proportions, like System Of A Down and Serj Tankian, bets on the musical vanguard from sounds not always connected and cohesive.
Even so, even mixing MPB, pop, baião, trap, lounge music, lo-fi, axé, pagode, olodum and samba, there is an evident dialogue in the work. The relationship with faith, belonging, and access to tranquillity in times of extreme haste and focus on the clock shape a plot structure that invites the listener to think about a kind of pause. A deeper breath that takes you to the purest state of relaxing bliss.
The need to find oneself and know one's own needs are other intrinsic details even in the melodies structured simply and uniquely by Candioco and Francisco Viva, names who had Bernardo Rezende's support in creating an artwork that represents the whole core of Ensaios Férteis. His modernist traces have a clear influence of Tarsila Do Amaral in his drawings that give life to the words movement, origin, and balance.
Released on 10/20/2022 via Cantores Del Mundo, Ensaios Férteis is an EP that shows that it is possible for art to exist even in disharmony. Not for less, it is a work that sonorizes the concept of poverty art while elevating it to a level of modernist experimentalism that gives it an undeniably avant-garde status.
