What life looked like in Brazil under the military dictatorship in 1977 was recently rendered with claustrophobic intensity in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s thriller The Secret Agent. Whether the director coordinated the film’s cinema release with the label Far Out is unknown. Yet it borders on coincidence that the previously unreleased album Nineteen Seventy Seven by Grupo Um is emerging precisely now. Titled after the year it was recorded, it functions as an acoustic counterpart to the film: you hear what Brazil sounded like at the time, and the musical audacity with which this avant-garde jazz ensemble operates fits seamlessly with the film’s shimmering, humid fever dream of paranoia.
At the outset of Grupo Um’s pieces, things simmer ominously. It is unclear whether you are about to lose yourself in a jungle of trees or one of asphalt and concrete. Percussion and synthesisers generate a dense thicket of sound that gives little indication of where the journey might lead. At times, chaos seems to reign unchecked; occasionally, disconcertingly processed voices enter the mix. More often than not, however, the quintet arrives at rhythmically intricate fusion funk, tossed off with virtuosic ease. Despite all its bodily groove, the percussive foundation remains so nervously wired that any sense of security is continually undermined. In Brazil, this music could not have been released at the time.
