the evolution of my weird relationship with music & the origins of my occult references
written in: july 10th, 2024
first of all, why is this relevant? why is art relevant at all, and why does some of it connects with us and some doesn't?
for a short answer now: i believe art is what inspires us, connects us with our sense of beauty and encourages us to make the world more beautiful through our acts.
but as i share a bit of my story/relationship with music, i think this will get progressively answered ever more deeply. :)
i always thought music was not for me. sure, i enjoyed some linkin park or legião urbana, and even restart! (a breakout colorful boyband in brazil, though i was ashamed to admit at the time). i liked some rock, a pop song here and there, but that was about it. playing an electric guitar would be nice, but it never made my eyes bright.
as i turned 16 or so, i progressively got more interested in electronic music, especially the "boom" of artists coming out of a new genre so-called brazilian bass, (where alok and many others kinda have their roots - people like vintage culture, liu, cat dealers, etc) the "rave"/burning man aesthetics with their beautiful girl models definitely played their part in it... (i was a 16-year-old, after all)
the sense of epicness and adventure of a festival like that started to inspire me.
this went on until i turned 19. i was living in san francisco, riding my electric skateboard, listening to this kind of music on my headphones, feeling on top of the world. the constant build-ups and drops in this kind of music does have this kind of "gym-like", work hard, play hard vibe to it, right? or perhaps just the "play hard", depending on who you ask. 😂
point is, around this time living there, i had a couple of experiences that forever changed my relationship with music. first it was my first psychedelic experience there, with no music at all - which was a crazy ego death that opened up my heart to a degree i never imagined possible. and then, my second one put me into a state in which i simply merged with the music. we became one. it was a transcendental experience.
it wasn't really this kind of EDM music, but a brian eno-style ambient with an electronic pulse to it. from something like imperial college of london or john hopkins' research playlists for psilocybin therapy. i had been introduced to it by some friends, and since then i took psychedelics with respect and intentionality.
so, this changed me. have you ever had an awakening?
if not, that's kinda what it feels like. :P
[mikasa gif]
slowly at first, but then gradually i started to notice more what was actually going on in all songs i listened to. it started to become intuitive. i started feeling the rhythm flowing naturally, subconsciously through me.
still, i was far from being a musician or an "artist" at all. i just kept living my life, paying a bit more attention to everything i listened to.
all good and beautiful, one year later, all of my plans, my job, financial investments, friendships and communities i participated in had collapsed. this was early 2019, i was getting sunken into a moment of deep existential crisis (right before the pandemics).
i tell this story in more detail in [other places], so i won't go deep into it, but two things helped me the most during this time: and one was music.
~ 2019 ~
i was completely uninspired, sad, triggered and traumatized, and laying in my bed, i started watching some the voice auditions from around the world.
i found a few that i really liked and so followed the rabbit hole to discover the original artists. that way i found a few artists i really like up to today (maëlle, london grammar, daneliya tuleshova). i also got recommended a channel called "in the woods", which curated "post-rock" music. i had no idea what it meant but it seemed like a cool concept, so i explored to find stuff that i really liked as well (those who ride with giants, black hill).
but the turning point was dimash. a nature/nurture freak, with a 6-octave range (pretty much both "male" and "female" voices), incredible interpretation, emotion, technique, versatility, both classical & pop background, he's the whole package. someone with a crazy talent who had the support and love to keep honing it since he was 5.
he touched my heart in ways i didn't know was possible through music, and i unwillingly became one of his "dears" (how he fondly calls his dedicated fans, which from what i gathered on the internet, is primarily made of women in their 50s+ [and me! 😄😂 i love this demographic. we share some common sensibilities in many ways... 🙃 i'll definitely be the grandpa serving tea, giving books and creating spaces for children to play]).
i didn't know art/music could convey emotion, stories, in a level of truth that only language sometimes can't. the only other place i'd felt this way before, i realized, was anime.
this led me down this other rabbit hole - i started re-listening to lots of anime/game soundtracks i hadn't heard in ages. still love some of them[link]. that's where i recognized i really liked OSTs too. it's crazy how they can create an atmosphere, a mood that invites you to experience yourself more deeply and to paint it with your own feelings.
and then two major things happened. 1) i discovered dakhabrakha, and 2) i discovered brazilian nerdcore.
~ 2020 ~
first, it was dakhabrakha. this was 2020. while listening to quite some indie/folk/traditional asian music, thanks to youtube again, i was recommended one of their live performances. it was instant love.
i had never heard of the term "world music" (though i was listening to some of it), and much less heard of it interpreted through the lens of ukrainian "ethno-chaos". a few of their songs may sound/look at first look like some common neo-folk with some quirks/drops of unexpectedness here and there that make it "fun", but if you listen to it, really, openly and attentively, especially their more unconventional songs, i'm convinced there's some ancestral, mushroomy alchemy there.
songs like "buvayte zdorovi", "please don't cry", "tjolky" carry so much weirdness and aliveness in them... the band isn't afraid to go from lullabies (kolyskova) to very intense, gut-punching stuff (specially for you) - in this song, for example they were able to pick apart my soul's angst and express it in ways i didn't know i wanted to express.
and even some of their "standard" songs (which aren't standard by any other means at all) like "yahudki"/"dibrova" (often played together), "vesna" or "oy za lisochkov" carry so much soul in them. plus their more recent jazzy stuff is so gooood... aaarrghhh, so much to love and talk about. :) so i'll keep it short.
i find them both traditionally honoring and boldly subversive. very unique, very beautiful, very metamodern.
and this was 2020. before the russian invasion of ukraine. i had a whole year to fall in love with them and feel the pain of imperialism and complex geopolitics still bearing its weight in the 21st century... i even did an [experiment of 6 months (180 days) using duolingo every day to learn ukrainian], but after this turn of events, decided to leave it for some time in the future, hoping that my work/projects can soon - directly and indirectly, where possible - impact positively everyone involved in this collective trauma.
anyway, i was in their [top 0.001% listeners on spotify in 2021] (i did the math - considering their numbers, i was in the top 8 in the world, who knows, maybe i was the #1?).
that year, they accompanied me in many inner journeys - psychedelic and not - awake and asleep - that helped me recognize, understand, and heal many fragmented/lost parts of myself. i realized deep down that i wasn't alone. their songs were able to convey my inner world in deeper and clearer forms than i could understand and recognize on my own.
they're shamans disguised as musicians. now moving on!
~ 2021 ~
on 2) the discovery of brazilian nerdcore.
another highly specific, unconventional "genre" of music.
if you search for nerdcore online, you'll find a description like chosic's:
"Nerdcore is a subgenre of hip-hop that focuses on themes of geek culture, such as video games, science fiction, and technology. The lyrics often contain references to popular culture and the music is characterized by fast-paced, intricate rhymes and electronic beats. The genre has gained a dedicated following among fans of nerd culture and has expanded to include elements of rock and pop music."
masterclass' "Nerdcore Music Guide" also shares a bit of the history and introduces some of the artists/precursors of the scene.
in brazil though, nerdcore really started its scene as "anime rap". mostly people rapping about a character or interpreting the story as that character (from anime/manga like naruto/dragon ball, games like GTA/the last of us, tv shows like the walking dead/game of thrones and such). i don't know much about the history of the scene in the world - from what i know, it's a reasonably small scene - people just created songs about these topics, not interpreting as the characters themselves.
in brazil, this scene grew A LOT and differently from the rest of the world. today we have the biggest nerdcore channels of the world (with over 100M/200M visualizations in some of their most famous songs). over the past ~10 years, it grew from being mostly rap, to a whole set of styles of "geek music" (how it's often called here).
the result was a new generation of young independent artists making songs in their bedroom, that got inspired by this gradual development of the scene (old-school player tauz), catapulted by 7 minutoz's hits such as the cornerstone naruto's "akatsuki rap" (220M views), the innovation of enygma (who started making "anime metal"), and the URT (a group of artists that for a long time kept releasing songs every week) which gathered a very engaged fanbase and consistently raised the bar in the last few years in terms of musicality, production and video quality (it's absolute madness what the editors do nowadays. they're basically animating entire animes out of mangas [static illustrations]).
i knew this existed waaaay back then (2010?), when player tauz was beginning, and didn't think much of it. (probably because it was still low-quality, plus i wasn't very musical yet)
well, if dakhabrakha showed me a universe i didn't know yet existed within (and outside) of myself, nerdcore took what i knew too well (my inner child, the stories that guided and affected me the most growing up) and presented it to me with a completely new lens.
now being nerd wasn't uncool. being angry towards my family, the world, and relating more to a symbolic, fictional universe than my immediate limiting reality of apparent doom and gloom wasn't so weird anymore. again, i wasn't alone.
7 minutoz was my reintroduction to the world of anime, which i'd been away since i was 15 years old (when the "seriousness"/responsibility of life began to devour all other things that were important to me). it was impossible not to cry when discovering some good old motivational rap like 7 minutoz's maito gai.
but then i started to learn more about the scene. this URT group was starting to grow quickly, and i was especially intrigued by a few songs from m4rkim - saber, fate, douma, demon slayer released alongside another character - akaza, by anirap (⚠ trigger warning! sensitive topic [18+]), and finally erwin smith, attack on titan - this last one consolidating me as a m4rkim fan.
these songs me decide to start watching anime again, beginning with demon slayer (which was all the hype at the moment) and reconsidering attack on titan, which upon first impressions, i hated the art style (weird, 3d-looking giant naked humans).
the songs had this feeling of amateur production, that made it feel familiar, reachable, that perhaps in a few years i could make something like it for fun, but they still had some undeniable quality to them. more than it, they had a soul - they weren't captured by the traditional music industry/commercial purposes. the artists are making it because they enjoy it, first of all. (sure, there's algorithmic pressure, but let's save this discussion for some other time)
i discovered i'm a big fan of this unique blend of epic/orchestral trap and rock/metal, and the evolution of m4rkim's sound can be clearly seen if you compare these initial songs i mentioned to others like castelo infinito (featuring great collabs), hantengu, crocodile, gilgamesh, kenjaku.
everyone will have their personal preferences, and each artist in the scene has a few characteristics that i appreciate a lot.
anirap thrives on crazy high lines with an aggressive drives and speed flows (very psychopath-sounding), kaito also does some very fast - simple yet catchy - trap-style aggressive/melodic lines, basara has my absolute favorite style of rock singing, rodrigo zin has lyrics and a laid-back style that hits in the feels, secondtime & oshaman have very different styles but both shine on their flows, daarui & okabe have very powerful voices, which make up crazy good intense/heavy songs, henrique mendonça & novatroop are definitely the most melodic and (traditionally) technical in the scene and make for some good reflexive/theatrical vibes...
and as for the women (a minority in the scene), anny is a badass, i love giu matsu's style and flows (some of dya as well), felícia rock, nikmouu and nathy sc all have amazing voices.
since then, i started taking my music listening/research a lot more seriously, and have been tracking it on last.fm since april 2020.
since i started listening to it, brazilian nerdcore amounts to more than half of my plays - approximately 66% - in the past 3 years. i counted 19.152 plays out of 28.858, featuring 25 nerdcore artists among my top 200 most listened (17 of them among my top 50). - calculated in july 9th, 2024.
but well, what's the point of all this? i've already talked about it in the "why is this relevant?" section, but it's worth diving deeper. the kind and amount of processes that music can bring up and help us navigate is unbelievable.
very briefly a few that it brought up for me:
reclaiming my expression - when you're in a space of "nothingness", it can feel isolating. like nothing is worth believing in, striving for, or even communicating. even though i was living in são paulo, due to my reclusive lifestyle (going out once every 3 months or so, for over 2 years), i was feeling distant from my roots - my mother language - as i didn't speak with pretty much anyone.
when i listened to MHrap, and saw how the tons of slangs he used made that japanese manga have a very brazilian expression. this sort of appropriation (in the best sense of the word) - of using culture to figure out and reflect how it relates to you is often what art is about. helping us reflect, figure out - what is important for me? what do i want to talk about? to share? to live?
anime often tend to deal with very symbolic, philosophical themes as well. this made me recognize and inquiry deeper into: what are the over-arching meta-narratives that are powerfully orienting, challenging and healing for me?
in that moment of incessant questioning - why is life worth living? - music showed me a few answers. dimash showed me a mix of modern and "classical", polished beauty. dakhabrakha showed me unexpected, ancestral, raw beauty. brazilian nerdcore showed me joy, brotherhood and authenticity.
sure it's good to express yourself, feel heard/understood, but maintaining/developing connection, establishing threads of deepening intimacy (with yourself, others and the universe), that's what it's about.
and what really showed me that was the next level of all this, música do círculo.
but that's a whole other story, still [currently unfolding].
after all, perhaps we need some initiations. non-ordinary states of consciousness, transcendental experiences. maybe he wave to seek that path. maybe that path is seeking us and we just need to open up for it.
music becomes second nature. it's like it flows through your veins. it might not always be beautiful. it won't always be "normal". but you're connected to that flow nonetheless.
learning music/rhythm is about attuning to, listening and resonating with the source. making art in general is about honing our relationship with the divine. music presents itself as both a very mathematical/physical yet intuitive/intangible path. it's a language that dialogues with our deep sense of knowing.