As more musicians find their way to Mirlo, we are dedicating some space in our feed to hear from them about why they are releasing their work here. In our first post of this occasional series, we hear from Schuyler Whelden of Som da Massa, whose debut album O Amor e o Som e a Dor was released last month:
Translated literally, the band name Som da Massa might seem a bit pretentious. Som means sound. And massa refers to the masses, the people. Together, the title means “sound of the people.” But massa can also refer to a starchy dough made from cassava root. Nowadays, it’s used as a vernacular affirmation (similar to “cool” in English), especially in the Brazilian Northeast.
For us, the term has another, more specific meaning. In 2021, when Juliana Cantarelli Vita and I started an educational podcast about Brazilian music, we called it Massa, inspired by all of those meanings. We needed an opening theme, and even though we lived on different coasts, we figured that we played enough instruments between us that we could pull something off. Ju and I got on Zoom and sketched some ideas, her with violin in hand, me wielding an acoustic guitar, set up in an odd tuning lost to history. The melody for our baião (a rhythm from Ju’s native Northeast region) came quickly, so we added some percussion and used the recording to open the podcast.
When it came time to credit the performer of our new song, we figured, “why not Som da Massa?” It was the sound of Massa, after all, and it evoked the naming conventions of 70s bands like A Cor do Som and Som Imaginário. We also called the song “Som da Massa” and, appropriately, it opens our debut album O Amor e o Som e a Dor.
Before long, we wrote and recorded more songs inspired by Brazilian rhythms. The process remained largely the same—Ju contributing violin and vocals, Sky providing guitars and bass and keyboards, both of us playing a lot of percussion. We were lucky to have a few friends lend their talents as well. Alexander “Xande” Molly Johnson shares co-lead vocals on two songs. Luke Gosselin (tenor and baritone sax), Jeff Fennel (alto sax), Alex W. Rodriguez (trombone), and Louis Lopez (trumpet) form the horn section for half of the album. Accordionist Gabe Hall-Rodriguez and cellist Brynn Cotter are also featured. Brian Saia and I co-produced.
The album title O Amor e o Som e a Dor (roughly, “love and sound and pain”) comes from our song “Os Pingo do Tambor.” Like the name of the band, it was inspired by a certain era of MPB (Música Popular Brasileira), when artists were used traditional rhythms and playful poetic language—sometimes impenetrable language—to survive a difficult social and political context.
These nods to the past do not mean we are only looking back. Yes, we are releasing the album on vinyl, but we recognize that most people won’t listen to it in that medium. Even if they have a record player, they are likely to engage digitally, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Ju lives in Seattle. I live in Massachusetts. Many of our friends and family are in Brazil. Without digital distribution, most of these folks would not be able to hear our record at all. Heck, our band would not exist without Internet-based technology!
As someone who remembers both the joys of getting personal recommendations from Charlie, who was the owner of my local record shop, as a teen and the frustrations of what three weeks for a worn-out LP of Eric Dolphy’s Last Date to arrive via inter-library loan just so I could find out what it sounded like, I have ambivalent feelings about the streaming experience. Sure, it leaves a whole world of music at my fingertips, but it almost completely severs the connection between artists and listeners in the process.
From the artist’s perspective, these platforms have also basically killed off any chance of earning a living from recorded music. They pay very little, are completely opaque in their processes, and many of them are engaged in using LLMs to mimic existing music so that they can stop working with artists at all. It’s quite a lovely coincidence that the trombone player on our first album happens to be a founder of Mirlo, then! The ethos of transparency and mutual cooperation, both on the backend and between artists and listeners is not only refreshing, but possibly the only way through the current moment.
We believe in the importance of musical sound to forming and maintaining community and are encouraged to have found like-minded folks at Mirlo who share our beliefs.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://mirlo.space/team/posts/674