Domenico Lancellotti (BR)

Domenico Lancellotti’s SRAMBA reaches back to the roots of samba whilst completely revamping its blueprint, indoctrinating guitar and percussion-led rhythms with analogue synthesisers, beloved of album producer Ricardo Dias Gomes.

The majority of SRAMBA was recorded over two months in The Cave – Domenico’s home studio in Lisbon, the city both Brazilian ex-pats reside in, where the arrival of a cache of Russian-designed modular synths influenced the direction of their initial experimentation: “Ricardo had these instruments, modular machines” remembers Domenico, “and I had my guitar, some percussion instruments. On the first day we started making sounds and recording them, and songs started to appear, sambas started to appear.”

SRAMBA is a glorious showcase of the duo’s style, uniting Domenico’s playful lyrics and rhythmic, samba-rooted songs with with Ricardo’s assured accompaniment of unorthodox textures and instrumentations. It may be a new language for samba, machine samba (samba de máquina), but as Domenico says, “samba da máquina is samba”.