Fabrication Defect

Ze, Tom

album cover

The Ravings of a Visionary Song Insurgent

Tom Zé has spent a career of some forty years being forever too hip for the room. Which, in the context of Brazilian popular music, is no small accomplishment. Zé got his first exposure via tropicália, the movement spearheaded by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso that happily doused tradition with a spritz of irreverent experimentation. That's where Zé lived, and for a long stretch of the 1970s he made defiantly unconventional song cycles with strong political messages. These were embraced by his fellow artists but failed to attract many paying customers. Later in the decade, at a time when samba had fallen out of favor, Zé's Estudando o samba repositioned the national dance as a kind of rarefied art music. It was this record that first drew David Byrne, the former Talking Heads frontman and founder of Luaka Bop records, into the Zé orbit, and helped give the iconoclastic Zé, who once described his work as "spoken and sung journalism," an international profile.

Fabrication Defect, which was released in 1998, finds Zé again out of step with the culture of his homeland. Or, at least, appearing out of step. It's a joyous, cluttered caravan of ideas: Potent African hand-drumming sits alongside generic drum machine bossa beats. The half-crazed rantings of a street-corner prophet alternate with the somber chants of what sounds like an obscure mystical sect. And everything is built around looped clanging sounds. Zé's fourteen enumerated "Defects" (among them, curiosity and political ambition) align him, sensibility-wise, with the patchwork electronic pop happening in the U.S. and England at the time. Indeed, this record segues magically with contemporaneous recordings by Beck and Stereolab, among others. It's proof that no matter how zany or misunderstood or ahead of the curve a musician may be at home, there are always some like-minded souls out there, somewhere.

Genre: World, Brazil
Released: 1998, Luaka Bop
Key Tracks: "Defect 1: Gene," "Defect 4: Emeré."
Catalog Choice: Estudando o samba
Next Stop: Os Mutantes: Mutantes
Book Page: 887

Buy this Recording

Share this page: