Brass Trax

Any compilation that begins with a 1960s jam about Brazilian Batman in space deserves to be in your collection, like, yesterday, and that’s something that can unreservedly be said about Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas, where “Tema De Batman” is just a warm-up. The album is a compilation of rare Brazilian psychedelic music curated Joel Stones, the irrepressible owner of Tropicalia in Furs, a Brazilian record store in New York’s East Village. For Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas, Stones mined exclusively from among his seemingly limitless collection of 7-inch promotional singles to assemble what has to be the weirdest collection of Brazilian music ever released on these shores.

Chances are, you’ve never heard Brazilian music like the stuff on this compilation. Although all the tracks come from 1967-1976, familiar faces like Os Mutantes, Jorge Ben, and Caetano Veloso are completely absent from the roster. In their place are lesser known acts like Serguei, known tantalizingly as the “Brazilian Iggy Pop,” and Fábio, a native Paraguayan, who poses on the cover of his single like a polymorphous satyr. It doesn’t hurt his image that the track is called “Lindo Sonho Delirante,” or “L.S.D.”

In fact, the promotional 7-inches from which the compilation was drawn are exceedingly rare. Brazil is an LP kind of country, and the 7-inch singles were distributed primarily to radio D.J.s. They were the canaries in the proverbial mine, sent to see if a track would live or die before a record company invested heavily into an artist or a new musical direction. As Stones explains in the compilation’s liner notes, 7-inches were “the cheapest way to give an artist—or for an artist to give his dream—a chance; it was the most effective way to gauge an artist’s ‘heat.’” As a result, the music on the compilation is unhinged and experimental. Anything but familiar.

The first thing to know about this compilation is that Brazilian psychedelic music is funky. Most of the cuts on Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas have a breakbeat that’s dying to be sampled and remixed. The album deserves a space next to Stones Throw’s recent compilation of funky American psychedelia Forge Your Own Chains, and, indeed, Egon, that compilation’s mastermind, plays a role in the documentary on the Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas enhanced CD. (So does Elijah Wood.)

The funk shouldn’t be so surprising coming from a musical scene as racially polyglot as Brazil’s. Fábio, for example, was a protégé of Tim Maia, the great originator of samba soul. What is surprising is that this music was released under a military dictatorship. Keep in mind, while listening to Fábio’s wild trip, that it was released in 1968, a year before Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were forced into exile. The context gives the music an added charge. Not only is it transgressive socially, it’s also a means of political subversion.

That’s not to say that the musicians speak with a single voice. In fact, the compilation represents a wide variety of psychedelic styles both native and foreign. “God Save the Queen” by 14 Bis—Stones is unsure whether this 14 Bis is the same band as the 14 Bis that would achieve Brazilian pop fame later in the 1970s—has the bluesy heaviness of Bubble Puppy or Moving Sidewalks. The track would fit right in on Acid Visions or any other compilation of Texas psychedelia. Banda De 7 Leguas’s “Dia De Chuva,” on the other hand, sounds like it came straight off the Sunset Strip. “Som Imaginario De Jimmi Hendrix” is explicit about its inspiration, but it also includes a funky bridge that would do George Clinton proud. On the domestic tip, Ely’s “As Turbinas Estao Ligadas” fits the standard Tropicália mold, and Marisa Rossi’s oddity “Cintura De Fogo” could have come from nowhere but Brazil.

But Brazil Guitar Fuzz Bananas isn’t just about the music that it makes public. It’s also a reflection of Joel Stones, one of the weirder record store owners in New York, and the alternate reality that he inhabits. The documentary about the making of the compilation could just as easily be a reproduction of Stones’s daily existence. Shots of Stones boarding a plane for L.A. are interspersed among vintage b-roll of airports and airplanes from the 1960s, and you can easily imagine that that’s how Stones experiences the world, as a never-ending mod wonderland with Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro as its twin capitals.

As Stones tells an illustrator in the documentary, “I’m in the banana.”

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