King Nobody - 2017

​

For the first time, I had a short and well-established deadline to compose all the songs for a new album. Three months were dedicated to thinking about the repertoire that we rehearsed for five days and which, because of the talent and empathy of everyone involved, was recorded in practically two days in a studio in the interior of São Paulo. In the midst of the composition process, among so many discoveries, my friend, the poet Erick Monteiro Moraes, showed his translations of Rose Ausländer, an impressive woman, German-speaking poet, Jewish, Holocaust survivor, whose work is little known in Brazil. I was impressed by the poems and their versions in Portuguese. I wrote two of them, and "Nobody" was decisive in understanding who I am now.

The authority to deny forms and orders is what makes "King Nobody" the ideal character to represent criticism, the possible and change. The universal, absolute, free, modern being. As I learned from Antonio Cicero, "modern" is an adjective that comes from the Latin adverb "modo", which means "right now" and is related to the essence of this moment. When I say “this instant”, I am referring to the instant in which I find myself, there is a self as its necessary condition, without which this instant cannot be conceived. This self, however, is not personal, but universal, that is, even if I deny everything around me, even if I deny that I am a 29-year-old Brazilian, for example, I cannot help but think that I am not this instant. Above all, now I am nobody and, therefore, I am whatever I want, possibility and change, imagination and freedom. "Every creative artist", states the author of two lyrics on this album, "has always been and is modern", as he is "eccentric in relation to any positive or conventional center" and represents, in his own singularity, legitimate novelty.

This album, therefore, the fourth of my career, arrives as an achievement and a revelation: it is me more than ever now, the "King Nobody", music sovereign in its freedom.

Arthur Nogueira
June/2017