Click to access HI-BRAZIL channel on YoutubeHi, pals! It's a pleasure to announce that HI-BRAZIL videos on Youtube are reaching the mark of 15.000 views. Let's do the Samba!, the first hit of the trio's debut album, was watched by more of 6.500 Youtubers. Released in November 2007, the video, directed by the creative staff of 666 rmx, is an anathema to the abundant fertility of nature. Mainly in Brazilian land - where, according to the registrar Pero Vaz de Caminha, who sent the letter to the king of Portugal announced the discovery of Brazil in 1500 -, "planting here, everything flows". The digital album is also a critical to the civilization in which the colonizer, believing in the illusion of having spaces of ground on Earth, dominates in a predatory way those who were in that place first. And, just like the nature around, assimilate its culture and trivializes it, until the colonized ones will admire only another culture that, until then, seemed to be alien for them.
"The music was composed in 2004," explains Mauricio Businari, from HI-BRAZIL. "I used GarageBand on my G3. ... A blue dalmation... I was pissed of at that moment of my life, very shocked by the course of world politics and its consequences on Brazil. At the same time, following a dive in search of true inner stimuli leaving my soul "connected." It was a movement in and out, almost at the same time. The time interval between them was very short".
Hence came the idea of producing an album that was a criticism of the colonial system imposed to the "Third World" nations by "the First World" ones. The album would receive the title "1822", the year of the independence of Brazil, and would be launched under the nickname of DOT, a music research project that was developed with Mauricio's partner, André Luiz Salibi. The work, however, would be postponed until 2007 when, after a strong flu that left Mauricio very sick, he decided it was time to release emotions and reduce the difference between internal and external pressures of himself. "When Gargântula was recorded, in June of 2007, was winter in my country. I was in so much fever, and the beats resound in my head and I felt more and more confident, until the words started to jump out of my throat like little spiders, you know? And, from that point, I knew what I had to do. In August, the album was ready".
The idea to launch the debut album via Creative Commons came after Businari's experimental work on CC Mixter, a portal designed for a community interested in exchanging musical sounds. And creating new music with banks of sounds exchanged between users. "Months before, I was finishing a remix for Natchoongi, which participated in the Salman Ahmad remixes contest. In that site, all the work was registered with Creative Commons licenses. And then I began to ask one thousand things to Google and the opportunity was lit like a lamp. In less than six months, the music Gargântula has been downloaded more than six thousand times. Right now, we have ten thousand downloads of that song. The staff of Nine Inch Nails, for example, was only doing it this year ...", remember the musician.
Triangle
With the arrival of Guacymar Mazzariello, the duo HI-BRAZIL, became a triangle. And the chance came for enchant the guys 666rmx to take care of all HI-BRAZIL video production. For the joy of the trio, the nice guys of 666rmx accepted the challenge. "I watched the first video produced by HI-BRAZIL for the tune Gargântula. When I saw that sea lion dancing, the Betty Boop character, and the story being retelled, reissued in pieces to be transformed in another statment, the arrangement, the voice of Businari, I said: Stop editing right now. This work is done, there is no more to do. We have to release it! From that moment on, I was becoming a member of HI-BRAZIL, and started to discuss ideas about the production of Let's do the Samba! video".
Salibi tells that the whole creative process around the video was based on randomness. As a storm of ideas, words were introduced to Google in search of the images that best represented them. "For two or three days, we keep searching and saving images collected in the net. It was very funny, because we have being used Cool Iris, a plugin for browsers, which is an image viewer, to search pictures in a random way. We found many things! And the puzzle get solved", he says.
All images, without exception, received small "touches" of HI-BRAZIL visual arts, led by André and Guacymar. As the very first video, starred by Betty Boop (Gargântula), in Let's do the Samba!, the characters sometimes dance in still images, in extracts of old films, and in Flash animations made by 666rmx. The comcept parameters followed the techniques of collage and animation for web. There is none central character in this story told in this unusual way, where all characters have their identity preserved with the use of eye stripes. On a planet called Earth, the ship of HI-BRAZIL is fuming, throwing bananas over human heads.
Carmen Miranda
Carmen Miranda, whose centenary of birth is celebrated this year, is on Let's do The Samba! video, appearing as some kind of "guest artistst". A HI-BRAZIL's tribute to the diva that, according to some musical historians, would have created the Tropicalism, an important brazilian musical movement. "This is our tribute to her. On our site, there is a release in the form of a story that better explains her involvement in the plot," warns Businari. "His final appearance is surprising and show how we feel about her, and her contribution to our culture and our expression of art".
Want to know more about this and other albums of the HI-BRAZIL? Visit the website. Downloads are free.
http://homepage.mac.com/hibrazil
