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times people already know the story, so they're more inter ested in how it's interpreted. riO S v '. /oIILI . .. ""':\ #1' ., . ·U·� ' ... <\G ...,. In 1988, David Byrne began work on the film lie Aye: the House of Life, A year later, he debuted his record label, Luaka Bop (named after a Sri Lankan tea) with a compilation of Brazilian music, Four volumes and subsequent Brazilian tracks on his Latin album Rei Momo followed .. ����!;;������������� ......... ___ , ..;... , ;..;,; ___ :--- J people are playing bongos on the beach or something, but the reality is much more raw. These rehearsals of the drum � the streets don't have names. Most of the time, nobody knows where anything is. There's no way of finding it unless you have a map. So every afternoon, there's this furi ous faxing of maps, INSTEAD OF USING ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY TO PUT NUMBERS ON THEIR HOUSES. Yeah, it's a way of dealing with the tradition. A huge movie palace in Madras, India. The full house is filled with families children eating sweets, men chewing paan leaves, women gossiping between rows, waiting for the show to begin, In a rush of swirling strings, pummeling drum machines, kaleidoscopic sitars and banjos, the film begins. DID YOU ENCOUNTER THE SAME KIND OF MIXED-UP REFERENTS IN INDIA AS IN JAPAN? Most of what I saw was so much poorer, .. 1 might have seen one fax machine in all the time I was there. We were only in Tamilnadu, a state in the south , They have the second-largest film industry after Bombay, in the Tamil language, which is spoken in a lot of Malaysia. SO YOU WERE IN MADRAS TO RECORD? • I thought it would be great to get this guy [music director Vijaya Anand] doing this Indian techno-soundtrack-cut-and-paste to do one of my songs. "Happy Suicide " had a drone thing in it, which seemed promising, Again, rather than thinking in melodic terms or in pop song structure, where there's a bridge and a chorus and guitar solo, you're thinking in terms of dramatic things: Here's where the hero is fighting off a hundred horsemen, then he turns around and sees his girlfriend in the window, so the music changes, from that necessity. DID YOU GO TO ANY MOVIES WHILE IN INDIA? Just one, in Bombay. I had seen plenty of Indian movies, but it was more for the experi ence. Movies are incredibly cheap. The theater smells like a restaurant; people are con stantly coming and going, There's a lot of activity and the movie goes on for hours. They're not exactly slow-paced; the idea is that you're in that all-singing, all-dancing, al l action fantasy world for the evening. SO YOU'RE NOT EXACTLY THERE TO BE RAPT. Not in quite the same sense. A lot of Eastern theater is the same way, in popular theater. There's not the sense that you need to be paying attention every single moment. A lot of All the Brazilian music I was listening to seemed to mention Bahia as the source of everything, this amazing place that was so musical. The image you get ahead of time is a little skewed-they make it sound like some tourist thing where groups are in funky, run-down neighborhoods-the kind a tourist brochure would tell you not to go near, so most peo ple would never experience it. DID YOU WORK WITH ANY BRAZILIAN MUSICIANS THERE? I was doing a documentary for television on candomble, a kind of African religion that's very strong in the northeast, in Salvador and that area. But it pervades a lot of the country and has a big influence on the culture and the music. I went into the studio with some guys to get some grooves for soundtrack material. I wasn't recording songs real ly, I was improvising things with a bass player and some percussion ists. There was a berimbau player. I was playing guitar. I also wanted to record one of these bloco afro rehearsals a drum corps with at least 20 drummers, minimum. The chal lenge is that they're usually spread out on a concrete stage, the singer is a number of feet away, hollering into a micro phone over a really crappy P.A. that's kinda crackling and dis torting everything. With that kind of group, when you bring them into the studio, without the whole vibe of the room, the