Jose Mauro - A Viagem Das Horas LP

Label: Far Out

Far Out Recordings present a reissue of José Mauro's A Viagem Das Horas, originally released in 1976. For years it was believed that José Mauro was dead. Rumors on blogs and comment sections circulated that the mysterious Brazilian genius had either been killed in a road accident, or been "disappeared" by Brazil's military junta in the 1970s. But following Far Out's 2016 reissue of José Mauro's debut album Obnoxius, the label heard word that José Mauro is in fact alive and well, living a quiet life on the outskirts of Rio. Far Out Recordings now present, with the blessing of the man himself, the long-awaited release of José Mauro's forgotten masterpiece A Viagem Das Horas, featuring three previously unreleased and unheard tracks from the original studio sessions.

Recorded in 1970 at Odeon studios in Rio de Janeiro: the same time and place as all the music he ever recorded, José Mauro's A Viagem Das Horas wasn't released until six years later, when label owner and producer Roberto Quartin licensed the tracks to fellow Brazilian label Tapecar, who curiously released the album with several tracks already released on Obnoxius. Finally, over half a century on, A Viagem Das Horas will be released with three never before heard tracks, "Rua Dois," "Moenda" and "Variação Sobre Um Antigo Tema," as Mauro and Quartin had originally intended.

Conceived under the gloom of Brazil's military authoritarianism, from which many artists had either fled or been exiled, José Mauro and his songwriting partner Ana Maria Bahiana, combined their shared interest in Candomblé – a syncretism of traditional West African religions and Roman Catholicism – with MPB, psychedelic folk and orchestral music. Expressing a spiritual response to the world they found themselves in, the result was a sacrosanct, post-tropical music of pure transcendence. With apparitional vocals and propulsive, open-tuning acoustic guitar, and Lindolfo Gaya's spine-tingling orchestrations soaring overhead, the music has the power to inspire in the listener an almost trance-like state of ecstasy.