Marius Noss Gundersen – Visual Music – Retrato Brasileiro (classical/ MPB)

Visual Music is, according to the sleeve notes, a collaboration with the photographer Tomas Moss; the ‘power of combining vision and audio’, we are informed, offers a broader experience than either would alone, and we are directed to the ‘Visual Music’ website to discover more about this idea. The music on the album is all either composed by Brasilians, or inspired by Brasil, and on the website there are a lot of very beautifully composed photographs of Brasil and Brasilians. There is also a certain amount of explanatory text in Norwegian, but as it has all been inserted into the layouts as image files, I wasn’t able to paste it into Google for one of its Pythonesque translations.

BaianaSystem – BaianaSystem (Brazilian/ Guitarra Baiana)

Guitarra Baiana is both a Brazilian musical style and an instrument: the instrument is a small solidbody electric guitar, derived from the cavaquinho, whose origins predate the American inventions of Leo Fender and Les Paul (although not the solid bodied Hawaiian guitar). The musical style was a 1950s instrumental genre, that used these guitars to play Frevo, the carnival music of Recife.