8 “40 Degrees in Black”:
Eliete Mejorado and Bruno Verner in Conversation with Gavin Butt (27|11|14)

Eliete Mejorado and Bruno Verner are best known for their work as tropical punk-art duo Tetine, which they formed together in São Paulo in 1995. Their music and installation art — alongside their curatorial work, compiling, and DJ-ing — have persistently mined the promise of the post-punk scene in mid-80s Brazil. This conversation outlines some of the key features of this cultural moment, including its DIY ethos, its experimental activities across creative media, and its attempts to strike out from under the stultifying dominance of the 1960s Tropicália movement. Mejorado and Verner speak as former participants in the São Paulo and Belo Horizonte art and music scenes of the 80s: Mejorado as young underground club performer, and Verner as one-time member of numerous bands including R. Mutt, Divergência Socialista, and Ida & Os Voltas. The conversation addresses the political character of such creative activities at a time when democratic energies in Brazil were in the ascendant, and the power of the military dictatorship was beginning to falter. Before closing, the exchanges shift focus to the work of Tetine, and to the making of art and music after post-punk, at a time of dance music and globalisation.

Gavin Butt: Music journalists and musicologists are now well-versed in telling origin stories of post-punk in the UK and the US, detailing the emergence of bands from New York, London, Manchester, Sheffield, and other cities. But the scene in Brazil is less widely appreciated, and still little understood in the Anglophone world. How did post-punk emerge as a phenomenon in Brazil?

Bruno Verner: The post-punk scene in Brazil started a bit late. In the UK it all began around 1978 but in Brazil the first track that defined post-punk wasn’t recorded until around 1981. It was a track called ‘Perdidos Na Selva’ [Lost in the Jungle] by Gang 90 & As Absurdettes. It was because of a guy called Julio Barroso — a musical researcher — who brought back to Brazil lots of records from New York after spending some time there. In 1979–1980 Julio was writing a music column from New York for a Brazilian magazine called Revista Som Três. He would write delirious reviews of shows he had seen, records he had discovered and everything else he was experiencing in New York. He was hanging out with everybody and was everywhere. He wrote about James Chance promoting an event called Saint Valetine’s Day Massacre in a loft and performing with the Contortions, James White and the Blacks, and the Flaming Demonics with trombonist Joe Bowie from Defunkt as a special guest. Julio was after the punk-funk-jazz, Caribbean, and mutant disco connections. He was also a big fan of female acts such as Cristina, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, the Bush Tetras, the Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and so on. Once back from New York he decided to form Gang 90 e as Absurdettes, which was a collective of sorts with four girls, himself doing the vocals, and other guest musicians. It all influenced the beginning of Brazilian post-punk. Julio was a journalist, poet, and also a DJ — he was doing all the roles at once.

Eliete Mejorado: He was a full-time dreamer.

BV: Full-time dreamer as well. [Laughter]. Because of Julio Barroso and his Gang 90, lots of other groups started to form.

EM: There was a need, because we were living under a dictatorship, to do something otherwise we would die from cancer! It was the zeitgeist, there was a necessity to do something new. I came from São Paulo. It was very strange, because during the dictatorship we never saw anyone from abroad. Then, when things started to open up during the 1980s, actually lots of people from elsewhere moved there. The country was literally upside-down. We had massive inflation and unemployment but there was a feeling that something new was about to happen. Brazil was changing. It was like the windows were finally being opened.

BV: One of the girls from Gang 90, the first post-punk band, was a Dutch girl who came to Brazil, she was called Alice Pink Pank. None of this was planned. I think, as Eliete was saying, it was all driven by a need. There was a necessity to change things. People were fed up with the rules, with TV Globo — the then (and still) dominant media corporation in Brazil. We were tired with the old modes of MPB [Música Popular Brasileira]. At the same time, we had a funk and disco music scene going on with great stuff happening in clubs in Rio and Sao Paulo while the military regime was very hard.

GB: …And one of the places you and others turned to for alternatives was beyond Brazil’s national borders, right? It was looking to post-punk music in the UK and the US. That was brought in by trolley-dollies on planes…

BV: All sorts of things. In the 70s, for example, there were people like DJ Carlos Machado, who became a specialist in bringing new sounds to Brazil.

EM: He was already building a network with air hostesses! He knew people from Pan Am and had a friend who was also a music lover in an import-export company. He was into electrofunk,

disco, soul, and had everything from Afrika Bambaataa who was already big in Brazil to the cool underground stuff no one had. The stuff that was not licensed to the Brazilian market.

BV: And Julio was organizing Brazilian nights at the Mudd Club in New York, hanging out with black punk musician Snuky Tate and having people such as Michael Bernhorn and Charles K Noyes from Toy Killers perform there. So when Julio came back to Brazil he brought all these experiences and influences and a bunch of records with him. He was also in love with bands like Kid Creole and the Coconuts, and the B-52s. This was yet another side of things.

Snuky Tate and Julio Barroso in New York in 1980. Photograph by Renato dos Anjos.

EM: Talking about how it started, it’s funny because I don’t think anybody beyond the people directly involved in the scene were really prepared for what happened.

GB: Can you say something about your particular experience of this? What was your involvement in it? What do you remember? You were young then, very young. Were you in your early teens?

EM: I met this bunch of people when I was 15. This would have been 1982. They were into fashion and performance. We were doing living mannequins in window displays and we were into lip-syncing and performance art. I remember having to travel the whole city dressed up. At that time São Paulo was raining all the time. We weren’t normal — we were “darks”. It was 40 degrees but we had to wear black no matter what. Your make-up was towards Mexico City. This was the code, everything up, from the south perspective. I had to take the underground and a bus to get to downtown São Paulo from where I lived… but to come back home late it was a nightmare, because you could be raped, everything could happen. The buses could take two hours to come. Then you’d see a bunch of men playing some samba in the bus stop, they would sing stuff like “já que você veio assim você vai ter que dar pra mim” which means “now I have to fuck you because you’re dressed like that”. I was thinking: “how am I going to get out of here without them noticing?” You had to be prepared.

GB: Where did “dark” styles of dress come from? They seem redolent to me of the largely all-black clothing associated, at least in a UK context, with goth and alternative street styles of the 1980s. Do you have recollection of any specific “look” or any particular people you were modelling yourselves on?

EM: Nina Hagen — someone that was big in Brazil. My nickname was “Nina”. Don’t tell anyone. [Laughter]. I loved her. I think she played a key role in my life. I lip-synced to her track ‘Zarah’ at SESC Pompéia in São Paulo in a performance put together by my friend Jonathas Gama. I was a Lesbian Nazi governess and also performed to Meredith Monk’s ‘The Tale’. “I still have my allergies.” This happened in the main theatre at SESC Pompéia in 1983. We also presented stuff like this in the early days of [night club] Madame Sata in the same year.

BV: SESC Pompéia was Lina Bo Bardi’s theatre which is part of a cultural centre, something like the Southbank in London, but smaller.

EM: As Mercenárias also played at SESC Pompéia. Mercenárias were one of the first — I think the first — all-female music act from São Paulo that really mattered. Before that the scene was very much about men. Indeed, everything was about men [laughs]!

As Mercenaries, Sao Paolo 1984 (from the band’s archives)

GB: Let’s talk about As Mercenárias, because I think at least one of them had an art school connection. Is that right?

BV: Sandra Coutinho [bassist] and Ana Machado [guitarist] met in art school, actually, at ECA [Escola de Comunicações e Artes] in São Paulo. Rosália Munhoz, the vocalist, was living in one of the student houses at CRUSP [University of São Paulo]. But they used to go to punk shows and buy their drugs from one of the punk guys who used to hang out in the city centre; that’s actually how they met. Rosália in particular was in love with punk. Mercenárias shared a lot of stuff with the punk scene — which in Brazil started more or less at the same time as post-punk.

EM: ‘The Beginning of the End of the World’ — the first punk festival from Sao Paulo — also took place at Sesc Pompéia in 1982. It is also the title of Mercenárias’ first international release on Soul Jazz, which we had the pleasure to compile and write the sleeve notes for.

BV: Sonically they were very much influenced by the Brazilian punk scene as well. However, if you hear their music it is slightly more complex. You get a more complicated side of things. There are strange harmonies floating around and the song structures are less conventional, more conceptual and stuff.

GB: One of the things we’ve been talking about in this series of conversations is how punk really became part of the “problem”, if you like — that punk became rock-music business-as-usual very quickly. The idea of punk as a “style of revolt”, to quote Dick Hebdige, petered out as its musical and subcultural style became quickly commodified and sold back to the youth. That really inaugurated the necessity of a break away from punk, and towards something else — to post-punk. Was this the case in Brazil?

BV: Punk in Brazil wasn’t that mainstream — although what happened here with the Sex Pistols became known across the world of course. The UK scene was all new for a time in Brazil. There was a dream about what was going on elsewhere, a fantasy. This was very much present.

EM: What we call naiveté, to dream.

BV: Yes it was very naïve. Most people involved in the scene weren’t musicians. No one could really play. This was the first time in Brazil that we were breaking from the idea that Brazilian music could only be about the bossa nova or samba, you know, and a connection with jazz, and that you have to play difficult chords in order to make a song, a melody or whatever.

EM: And Tropicália!

BV: Yes. The punks were also breaking with Tropicalismo — one of the most well-known movements of Brazil from the late 1960s, and mainly because of the work of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, Tropicália’s main protagonists since 1968. The punk acts even had some kind of manifesto. Clemente from the band Os Inocentes wrote his ‘Manifesto Punk’ which railed against MPB, Caetano, and Gil. People just wanted to do something else. There was a desire, and a necessity to forget a little bit of our past. This desire to negate the past was very important to every single musician that has ever written a piece of punk or post-punk music in Brazil.

EM: Our journalist friend, Pedro Alexandre Sanches, writes in the preface to his book, Tropicalismo: Decadência Bonita do Samba: “Have I ever been born?” This is because, if everything is about 1968 and Tropicália, and we are always coming back to Tropicalismo and MPB, how do you get the right to express yourself? Or are we always going to agree with Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil?

GB: Does everybody know what Tropicália was? Maybe we should explain.

BV: In short, Tropicália was a movement that actually lasted for one year in 1968, that was led by Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes, Tom Zé, Torquato Neto, Rogerio Duarte and others — and by Rogerio Duprat, who was a key figure as well. There’s an album called Tropicália ou Panis et Circenses, which is also the title of one of the Os Mutantes songs. Duprat was the guy who made all the orchestrations and it became a very well-known album because there was a lot of innovation in what was being produced there. But, in Brazil, all that came after was kind of “erased” because Tropicalismo became the “Brazilian voice” to the world, mainly in the US where they hailed Tropicália as of one of the best Brazilian albums of the century.

I think for most of our generation, in the beginning we were all against it. We were mainly against Caetano and Gil. With most of the bands in the post-punk scene you can feel they share a lot of this. But, at the same time, we loved Os Mutantes, which were the strangest organism on Tropicália together with Tom Zé and Rogerio Duarte. They were the teenagers, “the rock band”, the ones who wanted to be the Beatles — but knew they were not. Os Mutantes were doing something else, something completely different and way ahead of their time sonically and visually — they sound completely different from everything and in part because there was a woman singing.

GB: As I understand it Tropicália was a kind of cultural expression which fused different genres of music, and also tried to fuse avantgarde music with popular forms as well. In a way, that carries over into Brazilian post-punk, because a 1980s band like Chance mixed post-punk experimentalism with samba. So I think what you’re suggesting is right: that the break with Tropicália is not as absolute as it might appear, that there is, in fact, some continuation.

BV: For the punk scene it was kind of absolute, I would say. They didn’t want it. Punks wanted to do their stuff straight away. Of course, the post-punk scene was different. People were looking back to Tropicalismo, but trying to transform it. This was different from what always happened in MPB from the 1970s, which was a more straightforward continuation of the concepts of Tropicália. When you hear a track like Chance’s ‘Samba de Morro’ we can say that there is some kind of influence, but at the same time, there are other things in question which are very different. It is already an electronic track. There are other kinds of influence which are not necessarily “Brazilian”, “Tropicalista” or MPB. This made a lot of difference because bands like Chance were breaking with the normal ways of recording stuff. The whole atmosphere of the song — its dissonances, the thin pre-set beat, the darker and spacious production — I think these contributed to a quite different sound at the time. Post-punk was in search of new ways of production, we were trying to imagine new concepts for the future or how the future should sound. And also breaking with the idea that you had to be a “musician” to be in a band. The refusal of the past, then, was both rejection and admiration. I think this double-movement is crucial to understanding the scene and the post-punk moment.

GB: Shall we hear it?

[‘Samba de Morro’ by Chance plays on the video; a live version performed on the TV programme Metropolis in 1988].

Chance in their studio in Sao Paolo, 1987. Photograph by Rui Mendes.

BV: In Brazil we have this thing we call “gambiarra” — when you don’t have the thing you want you substitute it for something else in order to find a new solution for a problem. This changes your actions, your things and the objects into something else. This was very common back in post-punk and is somehow related to what Chance is doing with the matchbox in the clip. First of all, it was difficult to buy synths in Brazil. We had Casio keyboards, we had drum-machines like the Dr Rhythm DR 110 — the latter was a popular choice of drum machine which lots of groups were after. When I started playing electronic music, the first thing I got was one of those Casio pocket calculators that had a pre-set with the Da Da Da beat used by Trio. Do you remember?

GB: Yes, I do remember — horrific. [Laughter].

BV: We always loved that pre-set. It was fantastic, we could make lovely music with that thing; at the same time, it made a direct reference to Trio that we thought was brilliant.

GB: Presumably electronic instruments allowed for experimentation because they were new, right? They hadn’t really been used much before.

BV: Yes, and because things weren’t all acoustic anymore. Even when we had drummers, we wanted to have at least two or three songs where someone would go there and just fire up a pre-set beat. It was charming. It added to the performance. This kind of thing began to happen in São Paulo with Chance, in Belo Horizonte with bands like R. Mutt, Divergência Socialista, and Hosana Nas Alturas, in Rio de Janeiro with Saara Saara and Black Future, in Brasilia with Tom Tom Macoute, and in Santos with Harry and City Limits and so on. We used a Roland SH101 in R. Mutt and in Ida & Os Voltas, and then later we got more modern machines like the Yamaha RX 21 or the DX100 synth for Divergência Socialista. All this stuff was very difficult to buy. We had no money. So we — the three bands — bought them collectively and shared the gear for gigs.

What else? There was this guy who was actually the first electronic musician in Brazil, Kodiak Bachine. He was from São Paulo and was in a band called Agentss. There’s one video of the song ‘Eletricidade’ which is a piece of video art as well: an 11-minute-long clip with everything, all the clichés, the robots, São Paulo as a Blade Runner kind of city. This is also the beginning of the electronic thing.

GB: I wondered if you could talk a little more about that, because there is the “making do”, the gambiarra of Brazilian music at this time — which is to some degree an extension of the punk ethic, that anybody can play, anybody can put a band together, and learn three chords etc. But then, post-punk seems to be characterised by both a continuation of that ethic and also an avantgarde experimentalism which involves expanded forms of creative practice, which doesn’t necessarily only take in music. It might encompass also, for example, the creation of experimental video work, it might take in poetry, spoken-word stuff. These things were very much a part of the São Paulo and Belo Horizonte scenes weren’t they? I wondered if you could say a little bit about that?

EM: I think in São Paulo it was more like — music was music — art was art. It wasn’t all together as it was in Belo Horizonte. In Belo Horizonte it was much more artistic. Artists, musicians, poets, filmmakers, dancers, video artists, and performers, they would all collaborate. Everybody knew each other and the scene was small. I remember taking part at the ‘Festival de Inverno’ [The Winter Art Festival] in the late 80s at UFMG [University Federal of Minas Gerais]. You would go to a bar at night and it would take only one day for you to know everyone. I remember hanging out with Adriana Banana and Marcelo Gabriel from the punk experimental dance company Cia de Dança Burra [The Stupid Dance Company]. We would sing ‘Muscolo Rosso’ by Cicciolina together. It was all about performance art, spoken word, physical theatre, and experimental music. They’d come from the poetry scene, from the dance scene, from video art. I think it had to do with the size of the city. In São Paulo there were places that we would have it all together as well; bands playing, people performing such as Claudia Wonder taking a bath in this pool of blood. But things were held slightly more apart too.

BV: In Belo Horizonte there was a strong poetry scene. So, bands I played with like Divergência Socialista, R. Mutt, and Ida & Os Voltas, all came from a background of poetry. There were lots of artists working together. For instance, the video of Divergência Socialista’s ‘Cú De Comunista’ was shot by Patrícia Moran, who is now a well-known filmmaker. In the early 1980s she was part of the scene as one of the vocalists of Sexo Explícito, which was another band. It was very communal. You wouldn’t play in only one band; you would play in three bands, all the time. The line-ups were almost the same people. Divergência Socialista were a bit like the Fall — with 100 line-ups! It was pretty much led by the poet Marcelo Dolabela. It was one of Belo Horizonte’s most experimental post-punk bands and one of the first electronic acts, together with R. Mutt. The music sounded like a strange cross between early Cabaret Voltaire with tape manipulation (we called it dada tapes) and stuff like Tom Zé, Os Mutantes, Walter Franco, Dee Dee Jackson, the B-52s, Gal Costa, and Dolores Duran. Everything was allowed in Divergência. It was a very liberating project.

GB: Talk of “liberation” and your mention of communalism makes me think: we’ve not really talked about politics. Could you characterise the post-punk scene in political terms? If I think about Felix Guattari’s exploration of emergent political forces in the mid-80s in his Molecular Revolution in Brazil, I could easily see post-punk as part of the wider democratic culture analysed there — one beginning to flourish in the shadow of a faltering military dictatorship. Guattari characterises this as a series of autonomous movements taking shape in — amongst other things — feminist groups, gay groups, and the workers’ party under Lula. It was really about creating a new kind of political body-politic unlike anything pre-existing military rule. Did this wide continuum of political mobilisation impact upon the post-punk creative scene, do you think? Or was it more simply just a part of it?

EM: I think the post-punk scene was very much part of it, because there was dissatisfaction in the air. There was nothing we could do but we had to do something. We would hang out in a cemetery and then we would write lyrics. We would dream. The thing we could do was that we could dress as if we were somewhere else. We had the necessity to pretend we were somewhere else. This necessity created lots of things.

BV: For instance, Divergência Socialista’s video ‘Cú De Comunista’ was played by Aron Feldman who was an important underground filmmaker from the 1960s, contemporary of Glauber Rocha from Cinema Novo. He was doing extreme DIY political documentaries with zero cash and one camera. He was already in his seventies. He participated actively in Belo Horizonte’s post-punk scene: he would drive the bands in his van, he was their official photographer, he participated in music videos and made his own feature films with people from the scene as actors.

EM: This was micro-politics that everyone had the power to do. There was this micro way of doing it. But at the same time, it was very disorganised, the whole thing. Brazil is too big. So, it took a while to organise itself. It wasn’t like nowadays where we have the internet — communication was so difficult. For a band to journey to play in São Paulo was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It was very hard. To travel inside Brazil was super expensive.

BV: Everything was through the post as well. In Brazil — not many people know this — we had an intense mail-art scene, which was also how people got information from other countries. Belo Horizonte was part of this because there were so many poets. It was concentrated in specific parts of the country. Thinking about travel, Mercenárias played only once in the north part of Brazil. For a band that existed during their post-punk heyday for seven or eight years, and couldn’t play in other cities or travel around their own country, this was very limiting.

GB: So it really was quite localised.

BV: Yes. In the beginning it was always São Paulo and Rio. It was way more complicated for the underground scenes in Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Curitiba, or Brasilia. The bands had to go to São Paulo. Everything was there. The music magazines were there –

EM: Mainly written by men.

BV: — The galleries were there, the clubs, the cultural centres, the big institutions like SESC Pompéia, the big theatres and everything. It was all in São Paulo.

GB: Did TV Globo give much time to punk or post-punk?

EM: No, they didn’t give a damn.

GB: In the UK we had the Bill Grundy moment in 1976, when the Sex Pistols went on to the Today TV show hosted by Grundy, and a scandalised mainstream visibility was instantly afforded them in the tabloid newspapers.

BV: We did not have things like that happening in mainstream TV. Everything that was scandalous was underground and therefore off the circuit. In Rio we had all the big new-wave acts. Every adolescent knew by heart any of their songs because they played on the radio and everywhere else. And of course, they were all playing TV Globo music shows.

GB: …And they were coupled up to big record companies, right?

BV: Yes. And TV network Rede Globo had Som Livre, a record label…

EM: But the man who was responsible for distributing underground post-punk records in Brazil was Luiz Calanca. This was through his record store Baratos Afins, which you can still find in the Grandes Galerias in the city centre of São Paulo today. He is a living bible.

BV: Baratos Afins is also a record label. Almost the whole post-punk output from São Paulo was released by the label, which was 100% independent, and 100% different from what was going on with mainstream rock acts on the Rio scene, supported by the major corporate record companies.

GB: So, returning to Divergência Socialista, and sticking with the political angle, can you give me your take on the politics of ‘Cú de Comunista’?

EM: ‘Cú de Comunista’ means “communist ass”, and it also alludes to the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) — the trade-union centre in São Bernardo, where Lula came from. So there were also these two meanings — and all these abbreviations in the song. Phonetically speaking, the sound of CUT in Portuguese is similar to the word “Cu” with the preposition “de”. There’s a play with the meaning here. Censorship was an issue during the military period. We had to speak in codes.

Divergencia Socialista performing ‘Cu de Comunista’ live at DCE-Ufmg in Belo Horizonte, 1988. Photograph by Frederico Piancastelli.

BV: It is about espionage, intelligence and security agencies; communications and miscommunications and the Brazilian communist party. It also alludes to the Cold War. Who’s going to press the button first? And Americans going after “communists” in South America countries. The 1964 coup d’état that overthrew President João Goulart, resulting in a 21-year-long military dictatorship supported by the US, is also alluded to somehow in the song. Cú de Comunista was one of Divergência Socialista’s Casio song-poems. It goes like this: “FBI”, “KGB”, “CIA”, “PCB” [Partido Comunista do Brazil], then “UPI”, “DDD” which means “discagem direta a distância” in Portuguese [long distance call], “CTI”, “PC do B”.

EM: That was the “micro” thing. Everyone was doing their politics in the way they could. If you weren’t taken by the dictatorship, you were taken by HIV, so you would be taken anyway… [laughs].

GB: So, this is not a kind of slight on the Workers’ Party is it? Or is it?

EM: No, Divergência Socialista would play for them.

BV: We toured for the Workers’ Party. We were totally pro-Partido dos Trabalhadores [PT]. We played in many areas outside central Belo Horizonte because of PT and we participated in their campaigns. We would play on top of trucks through the sound systems installed by them on the outskirts of the city. At some point we even composed an electro hip-hop number called ‘Só Democracia com Socialismo’ [Only Democracy With Socialism] which functioned as a jingle for their campaigns.

GB: Let’s fast forward to 1995, shall we? You two meet and you decide to form Tetine. Tell us a bit about why and how you came together. Your output since has been remarkably varied: you work as recording artists, perform as musicians, write and perform poetry, and make video and installation work. You seem to engage in a transversal kind of creative activity which moves across cultural spheres, and which isn’t contained by any one of them. In all of this, it strikes me as a very neo-post-punk kind of practice — if that’s not too awkward an expression. Can you say a bit about working across so many different kinds of activity?

BV: When we met each other it was totally by chance. It was the 1990s and I wasn’t in Belo Horizonte anymore. I went to São Paulo and was kind of lost. I was starting a linguistics course in the university. So, I wasn’t really doing music. One day I was invited to perform with a theatre group to produce a soundtrack, and that’s how I met Eliete. She was one of the performers in this piece. We just clicked. I had a drum machine, they had a piano and we had to improvise some stuff. I thought “she does stuff that’s not the normal musical way”.

EM: I came from a performance background. Everything in music in my life was so wrong, like I had a piano teacher who spanked me [laughter] and I hated it. So, it wasn’t like, in that sense, I would go to music. I loved stuff like Meredith Monk. I loved the idea of physical exhaustion and the work of Grotowski. I was trying to extract the voice from my knees. I was very much into these body experiments. Almost like dance. When I saw Bruno, he was so cool, he knew how to translate my body into music. I could sing something that he could translate into music. We did some very radical stuff in the beginning in very small venues.

BV: In the beginning we didn’t know what we were doing, actually. We were experimenting with everything. I was trying electronics and didn’t know how to programme stuff very well — it was all kind of wrong. That was the thing — there wasn’t a lot of judgement. When I met Eliete I recognised these as ultra post-punk characteristics of an artist. You don’t need to be the virtuoso. You try to forge other ways, and find other ways to make music. I was interested in that. It was different in the 1990s and everything had changed. It was all about DJ culture and super-clubs.

EM: The 1990s for me was a time where people would hide, even the DJs. Everybody was behind something. You would listen and hear loud music, but you wouldn’t see the DJ.

BV: We wanted to take the microphone. We weren’t interested in showing that we are “good” instrumentalists. Actually, one thing that influenced me and Eliete a lot, that I think was one of the most important things for Tetine, was funk carioca — which is another completely different side of it. Funk carioca is the electronic music produced in the favelas of Rio. Tetine got deeply involved with the whole baile-funk scene in Rio. We instantly identified ourselves with its sonic radicalism and the DIY side of it.

EM: It was love at first sight with the baile-funk scene since its beginning. We connected straight away with the attitude and the raw and sexual energy that was reflected in the bailes [parties] and montages [tracks]. The balls are like nowhere else in the world. On top of that we fell in love with the female MCs right away and began collaborating with them. Our song ‘I Go To The Doctor’ with MC Deize Tigrona is one of our collaborations we are most proud of. It was first put out as a white label and then Soul Jazz released it.

BV: When we talk about baile funk, we’re talking about an entire culture that developed itself totally outside of the Brazilian dominant bossa nova-Tropicália-MPB kind of “taste”. Until not long ago the genre was extremely criticized. People thought it was not sophisticated enough and that it couldn’t represent Brazilian culture. In 2002/2003 we started our radio show Slum Dunk on Resonance FM 104.4 and began playing funk-carioca sets every single week. It was the first time it was aired to an audience in Europe. Then we did Slum Dunk Presents Funk Carioca which was the first DJ mix compilation to appear internationally.

EM: At the same time, we put out two independent albums, Bonde do Tetão and L.I.C.K MY FAVELA, with Tetine’s own queer punk funk-carioca tracks. Suddenly everything changed and people began paying more attention to these sounds. We played the Wire festival in Chicago and we also did in an installation with Jarbas Lopes, an artist from Rio de Janeiro. The first time we did it was at Gasworks in London back in 2003. He built a tent which is made up of announcements…

BV: …Of parties in the favelas in Rio. The balls were announced in raffia banners. It’s very characteristic. So he built a penetrable tent made of sewn raffia banners he collected from the hills.

EM: We would then play and collaborate inside.

BV: It’s all improvised. We’d stay for hours inside, activating the space. Everybody is welcome. There’s food and cachaça [a Brazilian spirit made from sugar cane, also known as “pinga”] and anyone can play, drink, bring an instrument, and/or use the microphone. Anything goes.

Tetine and Jarbas Lopes “Deegraça” (installation) at Multiplicidade, Rio de Janeiro, 2014. Photograph by Eduardo Magalhães

GB: So is this like an open-mic kind of set-up?

EM: It is a celebration. The tent becomes a living organism that functions as a sound system. It is like visual poetry with addresses, numbers, sentences, and sayings. We don’t have much control of what happens inside the tent even if we plan what we want to do. It is a very beautiful performance piece, and a sculpture in itself. You can take part or watch it from outside. The tent becomes a huge sound speaker that pulsates in the space.

GB: I’ll just ask one more thing about Tetine and then we’ll open it up for questions. You describe yourself as a “tropical mutant punk funk” outfit. Can you say a little bit about the importance of self-description? Because if you’re creating new form, it’s arguably important to be able to refer to it and mark its novelty, and it seems you’re interested in doing this naming yourselves. Is this important? Or are you happy to leave it to others?

BV: For us “tropical punk” or “tropical mutant punk funk” relates to a state of mind. It is a spirit. It is a way we found to describe our actions as a DIY Brazilian punk funk organism. We made this up to talk about our music and performances. There’s an element in the word “tropical” that has to do with what we want to communicate. In a way we’re talking about temperature. It’s the black sun. Luminosity and darkness at the same time. We see ourselves as two tropical beings that don’t quite fit in the traditional tropical world. We’re playing with these two stereotyped concepts or clichés that are apparently opposites. We are making a third thing which we believe we fit in. It is not polite. It is not appropriate. It is wrong. That’s also how “tropical punk” came about. We thought to ourselves, when we arrived in the UK, for instance, everyone would ask, “Are you Brazilian?” I would say, “Yes I am”, and then they would say “What do you do?” to which I would reply, “I’m an artist”, or “I’m a musician”. Then instantly I would get, “Do you play samba?” Or “Do you play bossa nova?” Which was the recycling of the Brazilian stereotype. Then we are back to “Have I ever been born?” because there is a story after Tropicália, although it isn’t one that’s been recognised or is written in books. All the music books in Brazil are about Tropicália or bossa nova. It’s hard to find a book on post-punk.

Tetine live, London 2006. Photograph by Astrid Schulz

GB: Which is why you are also doing important work as archivists and historians of the scene right now, from your compilation of the 2005 album The Sexual Life of the Savages, through to the 2013 Resonance FM programme Slum Dunk where you played the “lost” music of Brazil. That’s really important isn’t it, and another part of what you do as Tetine?

BV: Yes, of course. When we started with the radio programme, the idea was exactly that. It was all about funk carioca in the beginning, because we thought that people needed to know that electronic music was being produced in the favelas, and it was completely overlooked by the dominant narratives of Brazil’s pop history. That’s how we got to Resonance FM. Then we decided: let’s play all the songs they do not play in Brazil; the stuff that people go like “that funk carioca, that’s poor music, that’s music from the favelas”; or “this doesn’t represent our culture, our culture is bossa nova”; or our culture is “um cantinho, um violão” with the guitar played in a jazz way. That’s how both The Sexual Life of the Savages and Slum Dunk came about. [“Um cantinho, um violão” is a verse of the famous bossa-nova song ‘Corcovado’ by Tom Jobim, recorded in English as ‘Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars’.]

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GB: I think we should have some additional voices now to join the conversation. Can I see your desktop image again? I do actually want to get round to that at some point, because the title of our conversation is “40 degrees in black”, but now you’ve come to the UK it’s like “8 degrees in gold lamé” or something like that. [Laughter]. There’s a shift which we can talk about there. Shall we turn to our audience?

Tetine’s Tesco. Photograph by Marinella Setti.

Audience member 1: I wanted to pick up on that exact point. Eliete, you said, “It was 40 degrees but we had to wear black no matter what”, you said you were “darks” — that was your expression. I got this sense that not only were you against earlier forms of music, but you were also against the weather.[Laughter]. The weather itself is encouraging some kind of optimism, whereas your optimism was founded in a certain kind of refusal. Could you say a bit more about the things you were against? They could be big or small. You know, in post-punk it was, “no guitar solos”, so anti-solos. Instead of long guitar lines, you have guitars but you have pauses in them, the guitars are broken up. That’s a musical thing, but there’s stylistic things too, like “don’t smile too much”, “show no teeth”, these kind of things. If you could say a bit more about the things you were against, so we can get a better sense of the “code” you and your friends lived by…

EM: Yes, show no teeth. And, if you happened to be a woman, “carry your own luggage”! [Laughter]. There was this thing about, “oh, I play bossa nova”, being nice, and this image of honesty and all those good ladies. None of this fitted within our rules. You had to be able to have attitude. Being a woman in São Paulo was not — is not — easy. It was, and still is, very macho, macho, macho. Being a musician, as a woman in São Paulo — it’s hard. So, there was this thing that if you’re a woman, you have to be able to carry your luggage to show that being a woman doesn’t mean you’re weak.

BV: We certainly had no guitar solos. Actually people had no idea how to solo, even if they wanted to [laughs]. No bossa-nova vocals…

Audience member 1: No harmonies!

Audience member 2: Were you also against the city? As an urban environment? You were in the cemetery doing things because you didn’t want to be in the city?

EM: You didn’t want to be disturbed. You could be there by yourself.

Audience member 2: I’m thinking this because São Paulo is already a metropolis at the time. A huge urban environment, and very diverse.

EM: Super diverse.

BV: Yes, but you could dream you were in other places as well.

Audience member 2: Another question: your movement was not in the favelas was it? Like Cartola or somebody was, and seen as an inferior form of music…

EM: Punk and post-punk are from the streets and the suburbs. Samba and funk carioca are from the hills.

BV: Tell the story about the time we were on a radio show in Brazil, and you compared Mercenárias with Bonde Das Bad Girls.

EM: They didn’t like that. “How dare you say something like that about our girls?!”

BV: This was a prestigious radio show. They said, “What do you listen to?” and Eliete said, “I love Bonde Das Bad Girls”, who are an all-girl funk-carioca ensemble. “I think they remind me a lot of Mercenárias in the beginning of their career”, she went on. Everyone stopped on the show. [Laughter]. The guy, a famous presenter, then went “How dare you say that about Mercenárias!?”

EM: You cannot mix people that way, you see? There is a saying: “Brazil is not for beginners”.

BV: Just like samba, in the beginning funk carioca was hated as well. It was something that people didn’t like at all in the 1990s. Funk carioca was influenced by Miami bass but on top of its structure there is a second rhythm called tamborzão which is a Brazilian beat that connects the whole thing with Candomblé drumming, Ogan and Macumba.

EM: …Which is a Brazilian religion, like witchcraft. Ogan plays the drums in the Candomblé and invites the Gods, the Orixás by possessing the believer’s bodies in order to communicate with them. Funk carioca’s tamborzão is so strong that it would make it rain… If you know what I mean… [Laughter].

BV: It became famous in this country — in 2005, when M.I.A and Diplo sampled the horns of Deize Tigrona’s track ‘Injeção’, which is already a sampled bit of the film Rocky, the 1980s movie. Then Diplo sampled it again, and made a track with M.I.A called ‘Bucky Done Gun’.

EM: May I just say something, Diplo was secretly listening to our radio show on Resonance FM back in 2003 and he got crazy about funk carioca, you know. Then he released his record. [Laughter]. But since he is American, handsome, white, sexy, everything is easier. [Laughter].

BV: When we released Slum Dunk Presents Funk Carioca, one of the things we had with the record label was that, “we need to place this music on another shelf”. It cannot go to the “world-music” shelf anymore, because if it stays there, it is going to be the same thing as ever, you know what I mean? It would be exoticized and that was all. We thought, it’s time to recognise that this is a form of electronic music as interesting as Aphex Twin or whatever, any European or American music.

Audience member 3: I have spent some time in Brazil, sort of hunting through record stores. I’m quite a fan of Harry — they’re an interesting band because they seem different to the other post-punk Brazilian bands I’ve heard. They’re not funky at all, they sound like Joy Division, they all sing in English. I wondered if you could say something about them. I also wondered if you could say something about relations between post-punk and other kinds of styles and genres. There are massive metal scenes depending on where you are, and there’s also a really big psycho-billy scene down in Porto Alegre. So you’ve got everything from CSS [a rock band from São Paulo] to bands in Porto Alegre that sound like Sonic Youth. What are the relations between post-punk and these other, more contemporary scenes?

BV: Harry was part of the post-punk scene. They were from Santos, a port city less than 100 kilometres from São Paulo. They were an electronic act, actually. Harry are included on The Sexual Life of the Savages. They made three albums, and were the first band to start singing in English. I think they badly wanted to break into the international market. You didn’t have many bands singing in English in the 1980s. Mostly it was all in Portuguese. As for CSS, once you get to 2000 there’s some kind of revival of the early 1980s going on, with the whole Electroclash thing. CSS is part of this mentality. Their music has a post-punk feel, and is very influenced by what happened in the 1980s.

Audience member 4: I don’t know whether this is kind of related to that, but I’m interested in your ambivalent relationship to Tropicália — not wanting to be reduced to it, but at the same time “tropical” being how you describe yourself, at least in part. So you have an ambivalent relationship to a style which is bound up with a “national” idea about Brazil and Brazilian music. I wondered how working in the UK is important for your work, and how you relate to other practices here?

EM: I don’t know. If we were still in Brazil we probably wouldn’t exist anymore. I think we would have stopped.

GB: Why?

EM: Brazil hates memory sometimes. It’s funny, the way Brazilians deal with memory. We are in an eternal Memento. We remember things one moment, and then forget them the next. That’s the problem with politicians you see. I always felt like a foreigner there, in a way. That’s why I was always wearing black, maybe.

GB: If you feel like a foreigner there, do you feel like a native here in the UK?

EM: No. [Laughter]. I think I have this problem now: I feel like a foreigner everywhere… [Laughter]. But here I am. It’s a very strange position. I’m living in another planet. [Laughter].

Audience member 5: Could you say more about the sexual politics of that time? About the 1980s punk scene, and possible connections, if any, to the gay and lesbian liberation movements? That’s one thing; then you mentioned HIV/AIDS a few times. There’s something striking about the strict contemporaneity of the emergence of HIV/AIDS and the emergence of punk in a number of dictatorial scenarios, such as in Spain and Chile. I’m trying to make sense of what analysis we could elaborate, overarching both scenes. Brazil I’m not familiar with, so if you could share something on the correlation between sexual-liberation movements and the punk scene, then the role of HIV/AIDS, that’d be great!

EM: We were with everyone. Everyone I was involved with died at the time. All the people who were doing the shop stuff, the fashion things — they all died. I’m lucky, to be honest. You had to erase so many names from your telephone diary. I was very much into the gay scene, where almost everyone died. Sexually it was all so open.

GB: Was it mainly gay men? Or gay men and lesbians?

EM: Everybody together. You could be everything at that time; that was the beauty of it. There was this moment from the 1970s that was like, “wow!” I think that’s pretty much the image we have of that time nowadays. But it’s not like that anymore, I don’t think. It’s much more conservative. It’s much more sectored.

BV: We have this thing we call “desbunde” in the 1970s and in the 1980s, when everything was allowed. First of all, people were not aware of HIV when it started. I think the first cases that went big in Brazil were in 1985/86. Then when, for instance, a soap-opera star would die all of a sudden, it was a shock to everyone. People were just dying. Also, there was a lot of prejudice. It just became a horror show.