Alex Figueira - Mentallogenic (Music With Soul)

What Your Ears say & The Cover Looks Like

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What We Say

A whole heap of Samba, a dash of cumbia, jazzed up synths, psychedelic everything, a pinch of post punk funk & attitude with a tropical toasted cinematic surf sheen & a sprinkle of dub without sounding overcooked and you're getting close to summing up the joys of one man band marvel Alex Figueira's new Tropicalia 2.0 LP for his Music With Soul imprint.

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What The Release Notes Say

An album that sounds like The Menahan Street Band playing in a tropical jungle, at dawn, right at the point when the first rays of the sun penetrate the dark depths of the forest.
During the 2022 summer of natural disasters, under an unprecedented heatwave, and haunted by news reports of ancient relics, sunken ships, and hunger stones resurfacing as rivers dried-up all-over Europe, Alex Figueira started to hear uncanny metallic vibrations and eerie melodies of untraceable origins, day and night. He recalls nightmares of winged creatures inside timeless structures of Escherian architectures playing cosmic instruments amidst tropical storms and acid rains. As the visions came more often, his wife Hester reported that he babbled during his sleep about South American demon Yurupari.
Soon, Alex found himself in a sleepless state and decided to cleanse the studio, with hallowed rites and the intense burning of Palo Santo. After almost burning the studio down, he turned to his neighbourhood’s most experienced psychic, seeking answers. He was told there were “cosmic entities” trying to manifest a message “too complex for us to understand in this dimension” and the only way he could find peace was to deliver those messages in a decipherable form. It was then he decided to transmute his hallucinations into music, an all-or-nothing cathartic solution.
Alex entered a feverish dream, fuelled by the kaleidoscopic motion of the cosmos, ancient meteor showers, and visions of forgotten interstellar South American gods. He remembers very little of the work, but the outcome is this record. Entirely composed, recorded, produced, and mixed in a frenetic nine-day studio stint.

CREDITS
All songs written by Alex Figueira.
Made between June 3rd and 11th 2022 at Heat
Too Hot, Amsterdam.
All instruments, recording, production, mixing &
mastering by Alex Figueira.
Artwork by Alex Figueira.
Pictures by Lorraine Maria Figueira.
Record pressed by Grama Pressings, Portugal.

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For more global musical delights take a trip through the Slow World Playlist sometime