Gilberto Gil: "Cerebro Eletronico"

Electric brains and melted minds.  “The feedback’s getting thicker/just some liquid mutant fuzz”…I had other folks in mind when I wrote those lines in one of my songs years ago…Lou Reed, Larry Graham, Eddie Hazel, Bootsy Collins…but they might as well have been written about Lanny Gordin, Tropicalia’s resident axe-shredder and one of the most brilliant guitarists most people have never heard of.  He elevates this LP like every record he plays on, contributing sounds that are more like interplanetary transmissions in coded extraterrestrial language than anything related to more conventional six-string solo stylings.  Combine that with Gilberto Gil’s effervescent virtuosity and Rogerio Duprat’s heady, retro-meets-future arrangements, and you have an authentically tripped-out psychedelic masterpiece.  It is remarkable to think that this was recorded after Gil had already been imprisoned by the Brazilian government, and was facing imminent exile besides, as his ebullient, joyful persona seems undimmed by such trauma.  There is not so much a darkness here as a yearning for another world, inimitably represented by Duprat’s still-astonishing experimental production.  The Beatles, Hendrix, Funkadelic…not even in their wildest lysergic daydreams could they have concocted a work of art this strange, or surreal.