Inside The Wire 437, Rio de Janeiro based Thiago Nassif speaks to Russ Slater about his integrative approach to songwriting. For his second album Práxis (2011), Nassif enlisted the influence of local visual artists to move his audio work forward, inviting architects, sculptors and painters to help form a backing band. He says his forthcoming release Mente - produced by Arto Lindsay – is “about connecting people that helped me to reach another level of composition.” The artist explains more about this particular track, “Santa”, below:

“The lyrics of this track were written by Fernanda Zerbini (visual artist) and I”, explains Nassif over email. “They came from notes she has in one of her sketchbooks.Her process of taking notes is very peculiar, she doesn't use commas or punctuation. Whilst she is listening, she starts writing down the words that sound most interesting to her and ends up creating her own free-form narratives. So, I read her notes and started putting together the lyrics for “Santa”, changing things round a little bit whilst I was choosing the parts that I liked the most.

This song is about androgynous and transgender people who surpass conventional binary paradigms of sex. It is about a species that has no polarities, a rising new solution to our society and uninvolved kind. It is about the sphinx that rises willingly, about a newborn that will generate possibilities for us. A sort of Saint.

“Santa” was composed as an Afoxé rythm which comes from the Candonblé (animist religion, originally from the region of present-day Nigeria and Benin, brought to Brazil by enslaved Africans and established here in private ceremonies, a coexistence with forces of nature and ancestors) and it’s also based on the Funk Carioca rhythm created in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

Bella, a sound artist that creates her own instruments, added the layers of noise on it, Claudio Brito played the Candonblé percussions above the electronics I created, Pedro Sá and Guilherme Lírio helped me harmonize the song, Jonas Sá helped me with the arrangements and recorded the synths.”

Read more about Thiago Nassif in The Wire 437. Subscribers can access the article via the digital archive. Mente is released by Gearbox on 3 July.