Carol Maia & Jeremy Gustin’s haunting collaborative album is the result of a long distance partnership during which tracks were traded back and forth across thousands of miles, Jeremy working from his home studio in Brooklyn and Carol from hers in Rio De Janeiro. Later they enlisted support from a number of key players in the Rio scene, Frederico Heliodoro, Paulo Emmery, Ricardo Dias Gomes, and from Brooklyn’s musical community, Will Graefe and Ryan Dugre, to shape this understated masterpiece of sophisticated global pop and quiet experimentalism.
It's hard to describe what Carol, Jeremy and their guests have achieved on 'it's nice to see a lake in your eyes', a kind of pop music that stands outside of time and is neither Brazilian, American or of any other recognisable place. Maybe it's risen out of the lake they imagined into being? Maybe it's formed like rain in the thousands of miles of air between Rio and New York? Whatever happened was certainly alchemical as you will hear.
Carol told me her writing on this record was greatly influenced by her reading of Marcelo Ariel's poetry book "A água veio do sol, disse o breu" so maybe the best thing to do to describe this music is to let you read one of his poems:
A luz do ser é como a água
também veio do Sol
onde todos os planetas querem entrar
Dentro do Sol
O ser é imóvel
como a gratuidade de um êxtase
parecido com a respiração
Fora do Sol
o ser é móvel
Tempo eternidade
e tempo cronológico
(Translation)
The light of being is like water
it also came from the Sun
where all the planets want to enter
Within the Sun
Being is immobile
like the gratuitousness of an ecstasy
similar to breathing
Outside the Sun
Being is mobile
Time eternal
and chronological time
