Mixing elements from brazilian chansong with african music, jazz and rock

One of the best bands from the vibrant Sao Paulo scene, creating a powerful mix of African influences including Candomblé rituals and afrobeat rhythms. The musicians are also well known from other projects, playing with the Samba queen Elza Soares and Fela Kuti’s former drum- mer Tony Allen. The group has 3 albums and 2 EPs and has aroused medias attention with its new and unexpected approach to brazilian music, beyond outworn cliches, mixing elements from brazilian chansong with african music, jazz and rock. The band has also became known for its influence of african-brazilian culture, more specificly the african religions in Brazil, called „candomblé“, most commonly from yoruba, fon and bantu groups. „Meta Meta“, yoruba term, means „three at the same time“.

Meta Meta is the center of a new musical scene in Sao Paulo, biggest city in Brazil, in which the artists work in colaboration with each other, amongst them are Rodrigo Campos, Romulo FrÛes and another group called “Passo Torto”. The creative colective has released over 30 albums in 5 years in colaboration with icons such as Tony Allen, Criolo, Tom Zé and Elza Soares. In its first album, “Meta Meta” (2011), the band presented a minimalistic sound with few instruments, combining polyphony and silence. On the second one, “Metal Metal” (2012), it radically changed to a significantly more powerfull and bulky sound, mixing influences from tradicional brazilian music, african, latin, freejazz, punk and avante-garde. The album got several positive reviews and compliments from brazilian and international media, on pubiclations from The Guardian, The Independent, Rolling Stone, Les Inrockuptibles and Liberation. The band performed on Roskilde, Transmusicles and Mawazine, to name a few major international festivals, and also toured a great deal in its homeland. The third record, “MM3”, the group presents yet another path, strongly influenced by music from Morroco, Ethiopy, Niger and Mali. MM3 was recorded live in two days and brings a more flexible sound with almost liquid structures, raging dynamics and lots of improvisation, faithful to the ecstatic and catarthic feeling from the group¥s live perfomances. It sounds darker then the previous one and yet danceble, lots of strange minor scales and rough, sometimes indistinguishable harmonies, and more intrinsic arrangments, difficult to determine wether the song starts or the solo The album also features for the first time three songs composed by the three member of the group, along with colaborations with Siba and Rodrigo Campos. Joying the trio, bassist and producer Marcelo Cabral and drummer Sergio Machado, both very active musicians in Sao Paulo’s independent musical scene, also collaborated on arrangments.