David Byrne Awakens the Story of Dark Matter

In 1986, I got invited to show a film at the Rio Film Festival. It was my first time in Brazil, and though I was familiar with some of the better-known musical artists there, I quickly realized there were many more I’d never heard of. A local music fan offered to take me to a record store in Rio, and I left the store with an armload of vinyl.

One of the records I picked up had the word “samba” on the cover and, oddly, an image of barbed wire. Many of the other samba records had pictures of girls in bikinis on the cover or a smiling singer, so this one, I imagined, might be different. The artist was someone named Tom Zé.

As my purchases were all vinyl, I had no idea what they sounded like until I returned to NYC about a week later. Upon listening, I discovered that many of the records were beautiful and important, and I still listen to them today, but it was the Tom Zé record that was a revelation. His music was the kind of experimentation famil­iar to the downtown NY music scene that I was accustomed to, but with a Brazilian vibe.

I’d never heard anything like this—radical boundary- pushing music was happening there too? (I wondered from my NY‑centric point of view.) Read more: “The Most Precarious Day in the Universe” I played the record for my business partner Yale Evelev at Luaka Bop, the record label I founded, and he was as surprised as I was. By that time, we’d released three compilations of popular Brazilian music that had been well received, and we thought, “Let’s show them that there’s another side to Brazilian music.” We decided to put out a compilation culled from Zé recordings. Counter to the prevailing “world music” trend, we packaged the col­lection as contemporary music rather than something folkloric or eth­nographic.

In the liner notes, the historical origins were explained, but we didn’t want the first impression of the record to be that it was some academic archival recordings from the past. This was very much contemporary music to our ears, and we wanted to emphasize that in the presentation and graphic design. The compilation was well received but wasn’t a big seller.

But we remained excited, so we suggested he might next do a recording of new material. He did, and between the two releases, it became clear that awareness of him in Brazil was gradually changing—people there were talking about him again. We realized that he’d been somewhat forgotten and had been viewed as a relic of history—but here he was now, making new music.