Courtesy Boogarins
The group.
In the hot, dry city of Goiânia, deep in Brazil and far from the cosmopolitan São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, Dinho Almeida and Benke Ferraz began creating rock music. They were teenage friends, having fun. Describing Goiânia as a “big small city,” Ferraz explains it was an unlikely birthplace for their distinctive, hypnotic psychedelic rock.
“It’s two million people, right in the middle, far from the ocean,” Ferraz said in an interview. “It’s a dry, hot place, even in the night. People drink a lot of beer. Cold beer. It’s a really country city. The big money is in agriculture. Cows and country music are what rose there.”
My first reaction to the Boogarins — who are playing Cafe Nine Tuesday night — was that they sounded like the Velvet Underground, but in Portuguese. And with longer, jazzier songs. With more complicated rhythms. As it turns out, VU’s not an entirely inaccurate reference, as the members of the Boogarins were inspired by the same music that Velvet Underground emerged from.
“We are part of the Brazilian rock tradition,” Ferraz says. “It’s stuff that we’ve grown up with and later mixed with all the influences we’ve had after becoming aware of more music.”
More recently, they have begun to incorporate Brazilian traditional music, “flirting with Brazilian grooves and harmonies more related to samba,” Ferraz said. But their music also pulls from jazz, and it is constantly shifting with each performance. “The music reflects differently in each country and context.”
This makes the Boogarins’ music something like “rock songs with a psychedelic, Brazilian trippy layer,” Ferraz said. “We like to fuse cool rhythms and beautiful melodies and loop them so they are connected and repetitive,” unfolding over a long time, perhaps 40 minutes.
The band’s live performance style is reflected in its recorded music, which Ferraz described as being 40-minute pieces condensed into three-minute songs. “What we create on the stage, it creates a cycle that is not something prepared or the same every night. Our rhythms are always really strong, even though we may be experimenting.” Ferraz said they perform “as if we were playing for ourselves. We like to do music nonstop. And we trust our good taste in music.”
The band’s latest album, Manual, is more politically conscious than its first, but is still very personal, said Ferraz. The lyrics emerged naturally from the process of creating the music. It’s about “this feeling of freedom — individual freedom — which allows people to think about all kinds of subjects, religious, social, family, personal.” He continued, “We don’t have pressure to write a hit song. We can be us.” People can connect with the lyrics because, as he said, “we are living at the same time and [facing] the same conflicts, outer and inner.”
The band never expected to become a phenomenon, or ever be full-time musicians. “Record deals don’t exist in Brazil,” Ferraz said. And yet the band’s music connected with “people on the other side of the planet,” fueling a record deal and a tour schedule. The band’s members had all been pursuing other things — day jobs, college degrees — that they left behind with their unexpected success. Some of that has been difficult, but as Ferraz said, “an artist likes to show what kind of beauty or ugliness he’s creating. It’s too good to think about why. Why not?”
As they began touring, free from the day-to-day routines that keep most people “running against time,” Ferraz said, “we really started finding ourselves” Now, it’s “always about what we’re creating.”
I asked Ferraz to tell me about the personalities of his bandmates. There was a long pause.
“They’re here in the van with me,” he said.
“So be flattering,” I said.
The drummer, Ynaiã, he told me, is “a really strong guy. He can play for two hours non-stop.” Dinho, the vocalist, is “a really strong guy with a big heart.” And Raphael, he said, sounding playful now, is “a quiet guy but an angry guy, and right now he looks like a perv with his big mustache.” I could hear them laughing, four Brazilian guys in a band, headed toward us.
The Boogarins will play at Cafe Nine on April 19, along with Procedure Club and Copper Blue. Tickets are $10; doors open at 8:00.