Queda Livre by Caxtrinho

If you were to tell your life’s story, where would you start? Rather than outright answering this question, Queda Livre by Caxtrinho reimagines the literary genre of chronicle as a meandering, rhizomatic, nebulous entity. No life story exists without context, and our protagonist who grew up as a black man in an underprivileged suburb of Rio de Janeiro experiences the windfall of an endlessly complex history in every challenge and success in his life. While acoustic sections of traditional Brazilian music tell a more straightforward narrative, the band frequently diverts into vast, misty fields of psychedelia, gazing jaws agape into the sublime magnitude of dispersed causes that influence so many facets of this story. Swiftly jumping between these intertwining webs of causality in a vain attempt to tie a neat bow, we are left with nothing but the oft-ignored impacts of oft-forgotten history, forcing us to reexamine our own stories as inexhaustible wells of complexity from which we must judiciously make cuts to retain sanity.

- Michael