March 26, 2021 - Dreamstart Music
These have been very confusing times. I’ve been finding the feeling of hope again very recently, in tiny glimpses, while walking past other people down the street in the springtime sunshine, feeding off of their energy. Or catching more crumbs of success from friends and family. I’m hearing more and more stories of people dropping what they were pursuing before this pandemic and starting something new. We’re beginning to air out, to let in some fresh perspectives and fresh ideas. There’s a sort of fatalistic future vision revealing itself, and at a point where we can begin to see an end to this tragedy, we’re realizing that we’ve lost some weight. It wasn’t weight we wanted to lose, and it wasn’t just “weight” when we still held it. It was loved ones, good health, career paths, a stronger illusion of stability, financial security, community. Nonetheless, we walk forward with fewer ties, and we aren’t going to be able to collectively heal without accepting the levity.
I spent almost a whole year looking forward to when I’m no longer agonizing at this forced lightness of existence. But pain will always be here, because it is a tool, an adaptation for survival in this reality of self-awareness we’ve evolved into. The work at hand is not to recreate lives without discomfort or change. We must grow and remember that our resiliency is an adaptation too.
The COVID-19 pandemic sent Brazilian multi-instrumentalist Manoel Tosto from his established music career in Barcelona back to his hometown on a remote island off the east coast of Brazil, where he’s been helping his family run their farming business. It certainly sounds like an idyllic setting to return home to, and it’s easy for us in a concrete jungle or a suburban hell or a toxic family dynamic to dismiss what was certainly a creative crisis and a difficult decision. All artists have to painstakingly carve space to share their work out of a crowded rock wall. That cavity is the true paradise for a creative who craves to be heard. To lose it is to lose much of what they’ve worked for professionally. Tosto, like millions of others, feels the loss acutely. He has taken what he has left—safety, family, space for contemplation, musical instruments, an expertise, an empathy, and an ability to record sound—and released the album Biera De Praia as an act of resilience. With simple guitar-driven mostly instrumental compositions that offer natural and complex emotive environments behind a hazy film and atmospheric birdsong, Biera De Praia (which means “beachfront” in Portuguese) is a body of work designed to give us who listen contemplative space to heal. It is a pillowy escape pod and an offering of auditory tropical vacation from the anguish of our everyday present.
Lush, organic, ambling, meditative, laid back and beachy, these songs are rooted in a Latin sensibility with a folk center and a free-flowing stream-of-consciousness. Slipping into the world music genre, they gently command a sense of present, but they don’t stay in one place for long. Like mockettes in a quiet short film or thoughts floating down a river before you, the songs are short but they don’t feel fast. Highlights include the crooning minor keys of ‘Goddess of Fortune,’ the sugary country twang and soft-footed forward momentum of ‘Better Walk,’ the soulful lullaby of ‘Down The River’ (the only track on the album with lyrics), and the tender updrafts in the melody of ‘Your Hands.’ Every once in a while, you’ll hear subtle taps of percussion or atmospheric recordings, but for the most part, these songs all exist in a more narrow and controlled dynamic space. Tosto does not intend to whip us to the edge of extremes, but rather to carry us to a place where we have a bit of distance and can observe those extremes and learn from them. It’s as though we are able to fly above the cliff edge we’ve been hanging from in order to see where the handholds are that will bring us back to the solid ground beneath our feet.
As this spring unfolds, this new beginning, we begin to shelter and protect are reborn optimism like a seedling. When you need something calm and understanding, a tonic for loneliness, a shoulder to cry on and a push to move, lay down the active anger for a moment and let this be your soundtrack. You are durable and flexible and capable of growing into whatever you need to in order to survive. ☔