Rio de Janeiro newcomer Luiz Ser Eu joins Phantom Limb for the release of debut album Sarja, a fried and inverted Brasilosurrealism, melding outsider primitivism and tropicofuturist songwriting with concréte-psych and blurred tape collage.

Luiz Ser Eu writes that much of his music’s harmonic foundation derives from field recordings, processed into tonal frequencies and used in place of instrumentation. Combined with his instinctual and deceptively pure ear for songwriting chops informed by MPB classics Os Mutantes and Jupiter Maçã, and the extended-technique irreverence of Arto Lindsay, the results found in Sarja create astonishing, headspinning, gauzy adventures in freaky, mutant, sound-art pop.

The album title Sarja is taken from the Brazilian Portuguese name of a type of roughly interwoven fabric [Eng: twill] generally found in living rooms. “In this case,” writes Luiz, “what inspired me was specifically a chair that I saw in a really big and spacious room.” It is within this kind of lysergic, heightened disconnect from the minutiae of life that Luiz’ music dwells. It is disconcertingly familiar on occasion, but more commonly drugged and woozy, bold enough to chase its rabbit into coloured spirals both beautiful and disturbing. “In my music that’s very important, how everything connects in a way that makes it sound simple, even though it requires complexity to be made.”

Key moment “Carvão Branco” begins with nocturne whispering and softly picked nylon guitar to resemble a kind of haunted Jorge Ben Jor, reverberate in a lost world between worlds. Slowly, field recordings seep into space as the lost world begins to bend in its orbit. Then the track dissolves into a strangely disembodied coda of wilfully plasticky string samples in Baroque arpeggiation. Next, “Balança As Cortinas de Concreto” breathes with lamenting accordion shadows as a menu-screen bassline holds the piece together amidst sharp interjections of static. It is rhythmic, questful, searching, before shimmering starlight synthesis signposts the coming of a wobbly, clown-nightmare outro. Elsewhere, “Suavemente Vela Borboleta Sai da Minha Boca” is Luiz Ser Eu in miniature - with rare grace, moments of true but fleeting beauty coalesce into eldritch communiques from an outside plane, occasionally corroscating, but never unpalatable.

Luiz writes “The song titles were chosen in a way that prioritizes the poetic nature of the experience of listening to the songs, so they are not defining what the songs are but more like creating a sensation to surround them. And I’d say that’s what listening to it should be about: feeling the magic. Even in the concreteness of things, there is always this underlying magic, or science. And that is life. Much like art. Or psychedelia.”

“I didn't have any interest in making music in my early life,” he tells us. “As a child I was good at drawing and liked to listen to ambient music, nature, punk rock. And I used to sit down and look into the sun for hours until I started feeling that I was burning, and I thought a lot about everything or didn't think at all. Not for any purpose. I just did it. And then I understood that music is entirely physical, when talking about the sound and its vibrations. That changed my life.” This autodidactic creative hermitude tells us a lot about Luiz’ practice and the threads that led to Sarja (and preceding EP Pluvial). His work is strange, sometimes challenging, uniquely crafted, and has the power and poetry to stop time.