On the eve of releasing his third album Sergio Sayeg, aka Sessa, is finally feeling comfortable with the idea that this is what he does for a living. But it’s more complicated than that. He’s a Brazilian musician recording modern Brazilian music with strong vintage references for an American indie label. He’s one in a long line of Brazilian musicians with international audiences. With the birth of his son in 2022, he’s also a father and his priorities have flipped, challenging him to find new ways to tap into his creativity and grow as a musician while supporting a family. We catch up with Sergio to discuss the way Pequena Vertigem de Amor sounds different from his previous albums, from the instrumentation to the vocals and why he thinks it’s his best album yet.
Category: Brazil
Lô Borges :: O Mundo, Minas Gerais
RIP. Maybe the most naif member of the legendary Clube da Esquina he helped found, Lô Borges was also the figure responsible for bringing to the movement the heavy dose of easy-listening psychedelia that pushed it over the edge of a musical revolution. He was only a teenager when he wrote some of the best songs of that 1972 record that many consider, to this day, the greatest of Brazilian music: “Um Girassol da Cor do Seu Cabelo,” “Trem de Doido,” “Trem Azul,” “Paisagem da Janela,” and more.
Parque da São :: Ideograma
Inspired by the eerily meditative films of Apichatpong, the debut EP Ideograma from Parque da São, a Brazilian duo formed by ente’s Arthur Bittencourt and Relevo Espacial’s Julio Santa Cecilia, is a tropicalist parade full of euphoric atrocities and “hysterical sweetness.”
Tom Zé :: Estudando o Samba
Estudando o Samba is the pinnacle of Tom Zé’s tendency to use music as an intellectual statement and practical pedagogy. The title of the tracks, with a few exceptions, are monosyllabic onomatopoeias that refer to a Brazilian prosody, a gestural way of talking. The cover, produced by Zé himself, shows a barbed wire shaped like an ocean wave—-perhaps in reference to a twisting of the image of Brazil promoted by samba.
Raul Seixas :: Gita
A direct product of the Paul Coelho-sponsored introduction to alternative religion and mind-altering drugs, Raul Seixas’ Gita finds the Brazilian musician further embracing mysticism through a bigger infatuation with Aleister Crowley (the pre-chorus of “Sociedade Alternativa” is a direct translation of “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”) and Eastern philosophy (Hindu book Bhavagad Gita) in what eventually became his best-selling album and first gold record.
Guinga :: Delírio Carioca
Guinga’s Delírio Carioca offers an alternative history of MPB, like an anti-bossa nova: what if samba had not dissolved into cool jazz but rather formed a deep new assemblage with the orchestral soundtracks of Mancini and Morricone. What if instead of having slowed and reduced the drum ensembles of samba and translated them into a particular style of plucking and intonation, MPB had retained much of the quality of samba’s parent-genre, choro—the frenetic percussive fills, the elaborate counterpoint, the counterintuitive progressions.
Secos & Molhados :: S/T 1973
In 1971, before Bowie brought to life Ziggy Stardust and Marc Bolan appeared glittered up on live TV, before the New York Dolls shocked virility out of rock and Kiss neurotically inserted it back in, Brazil had already invented its own kind of glam rock, with its own painted masks, satin clothes, and made-up personae. Except their version had bass lines as deeply spacious as King Tubby’s, guitar riffs as gently mesmerizing as Zeppelin’s, and the weirdest nods to the flutes, whistles and chants of old Iberic pagan festivals.
O Bruxo :: Hermeto Pascoal (1936-2025)
In Brazil, Hermeto Pascoal was affectionately nicknamed “O Bruxo” (The Wizard) for his druidic appearance, marked by the long albino beard, and his ability to turn into musical instruments any mundane objects he came into contact with, as if he could suddenly extract from pipes, forks, birds, pigs, kids’ toys, dentists’ drills, his own belly, or the landscapes of a river or cave their innermost hidden harmonics.
Jorge Ben :: A Tábua de Esmeralda
In the middle of the heaviest years of a military dictatorship, Ben Jorge wanted, in his own words, to “bring peace of mind and tranquility” to Brazilians. He wanted happiness and imagination, visions of utopia, the quickening of the heart. A Tábua de Esmeralda espoused this ideal of absolute joy through its sweet and comic gestures, making reference at the same time to saints and soccer clubs, Medieval magicians and cartoon characters, as if they all belonged to the same semantic realm, a realm that was kept safely protected by artists like Ben as the surface of life was overtaken by political violence.
Seu Jorge :: The Life Aquatic Studio Sessions (20th anniversary)
Twenty years after its release, Seu Jorge’s The Life Aquatic Sessions continues to age gracefully. The beautiful sevenths and ninths chords, the breezy romanticism of the Portuguese language, and Jorge’s balmy croon transmute Bowie’s grandiose productions into a tropical oasis of pianissimo revelations. These alterations don’t distract from the source material as much as they enhance it, revealing the universality of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust era. What was written as British glam-rock anthems work just as well as Brazilian samba numbers, and vice versa.
Negro Leo :: Água Batizada
Rio de Janeiro-based label QTV has just reissued one of the most influential Brazilian records of the last 10 years, and certainly the best of the scene of “canção torta” (“twisted song-form”) that the label themselves initiated in the 2000s. Água Batizada is the most pop-sounding Negro Leo ever was, uncategorizable and leftfield as his work tends to be, as it focuses on the extreme potential for indie experimentation and soft surrealist poetics within the musicosmovision of MPB.
Atletas :: Reflexão Meteórica
Mario Cascardo’s first few records, under the moniker Mario Maria, already captured a charming kind of Brazilian ingeniousness: João Gilberto-like vocals and airy guitars were filtered and fused through an old, broken laptop. It was lo-fi in the truest sense: not as an arbitrary aesthetic choice, but as the creative result of a technical obliqueness at the frontiers of capitalistic development. Cascardo’s more recent releases as Atletas, like others from his label Municipal K7, provide even stronger evidence that lo-fi is now happening at the margins, where artists are using their own global displacement as blueprint for new musical imaginations.
Sociedade da Grã-Ordem Kavernista Apresenta Sessão das 10
Recorded in June 1971 and released the following month, Sociedade da Grã-Ordem Kavernista can be seen as the Frank Zappa’s Freak Out! to Tropicália ou Panis et Circencis’s Sgt Pepper. More subversive and more experimental than the tropicalist manifesto that had served as one of its main inspirations, the collective album was cursed from the get-go, condemned to premature oblivion by a mix of promotional faux-pas and the tightening of the Brazilian dictatorship.
Janine :: Muda
Just like the early MPB of Marília Medalha, Nara Leão, and Elis Regina, Janine Price’s music comes from the theater tradition, where she built her musical persona and developed warping intonation techniques. Just like their early MPB too, her music is centered on the tenor vocal range, which prepares grand orchestrations to a sequence of unexpected soft landings.
Nyron Higor :: S/T
Nyron Higor’s self-titled sophomore LP starts with a slow-motion frevo that drags amidst the reverb as if it was played inside a ghost motel. It is a perfect encapsulation of the Brazilian multi-instrumentalist’s new release: clouds of sonic niceties sculpted from the ruins of library music. Here, bird-like whistles and tremolos emerge into eerie atmospheres, from which they seem detached, like ground and figure.