Riviera Gaz Releases New Album CATACROMA Via Vampire Blues
Gustavo Riviera, Paulo Kishimoto and Steve Shelley crafted the ten-track LP without click tracks or pitch correction.
Riviera Gaz — the multinational trio of guitarist/vocalist Gustavo Riviera (leader of long-running Brazilian rock outfit Forgotten Boys), multi-faceted bassist/keyboardist Paulo Kishimoto (Pitty, Forgotten Boys) and drummer Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth) — have released their second studio album Catacroma, via Shelley's imprint, Vampire Blues. Weaving together a psychedelic collective consciousness where fuzzy riffs, glam rock energy, fearless studio experimentation, and Can-inspired grooves all melt together to form new mercurial elements, the ten-track collection presents an elevated expression of sound, stretching straight-ahead rock songs into strange and sprawling cosmic experiences.
The release is accompanied by a video for the LP's opening track, 'Giovanni,' directed by Riviera.
While earlier Riviera Gaz material was largely Riviera's songs fleshed out by the group, Catacroma is a more completely balanced collaboration, with multiple sessions where everyone contributed from start to finish. Additionally, the band intentionally distanced themselves from the sterile digital aesthetic of modern recording, opting out of using click tracks, pitch correction, or instrument plug-ins, yet embracing the mixing phase of production as a means to organize the wild sound of the record. Extensive editing directly informed by techniques absorbed from famed producer Roy Cicala (John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Forgotten Boys), the subtractive atmospheres of the 'Elemental Remixes' of Lennon's Mind Games, and Brazilian rock pioneer Erasmos Carlos whose most far out material became a central factor of how the songs were composed, resulting in moments like when 'Lonely Moon' shifts unexpectedly between earthly heaviness and black hole spaciness, the emphasized tension between stoic acoustic chords and malicious layers of fuzz on 'Name the River,' and drawing out of multicolored textures on the slow-blooming instrumental 'Crime Scene.'
Lyrically, Catacroma moves through the same waves of the surreal and the unknown as the music. The album title itself is a word made up by the band, assembled from 'Cata' (from the Greek katá, something that crosses, that goes downwards or inwards) and 'Chroma' (color, tone, tint). This is meant to represent a core of color that expands into sound, but also has a political meaning when color symbolizes territories of dispute — not only sensory elements, but also tools of resistance, affirmation, and confrontation. The word carries the gesture of traversing the chromatic spectrum, dismantling invisible hierarchies that order what can or cannot be seen and heard. This is the starting point for lyrical pictures like 'Monomania' that celebrate obsession in a world where irrational desires, impossible dreams and personal fixations are encouraged, the haunted hotel room from Julio Cortázar's short story The Condemned Door explored on 'Must Be,' and other shards of abstract thought.
In its totality, Catacroma is an aesthetic world of its own design. Its ten tracks are a hall of fun house mirrors where killer songs break apart and come back together organically, never taking expected turns and always ending up somewhere even more interesting than where they began.
Riviera Gaz Catacroma is available now on Vinyl and Digital formats here.
Photo Credit: Lucca Miranda
Photo Credit: Lucca Miranda
