①Please tell us about your hometown of Goiânia. What was it like?
Goiânia is a very young city, founded in 1933 (currently 91 years old), capital of the state of Goiás, landlocked in Brazil’s mid-west. It’s very hot most of the time, with not such defined seasons, besides a wet and dry period. Although very recent in age the city is quite dense with approx. 1,5 million habitants, but it feels provincial, as if time pass slower over there. The intense car traffic of the rush-hour and people asking for coins under the traffic light are contrasted by the beautiful sunsets and colourful tropical birds flying over your head. It’s pure dissonance, contrast and ambiguity, a very layered reality.
②Please also tell us about the music scene there! As mentioned in the caption for your first album “Som das Luzis”, Goiânia is home to some great indie rock bands like Boogarins, Luziluzia and Carne Doce. I'd also like to know about your relationship with them!
Goiânia is huge on ‘Sertanejo’, the ‘Brazilian country music', currently the main-stream music in Brazil and disseminator of the monoculture agribusiness mentality. But there are alternatives to that: in the last years Eletrofunk grew, which is a subgenre of Baile Funk connected with the local sound-system culture. There are Rock groups, some active since early 00s, and new ones, leaning towards psych sounds such as Josefo e os Para-Raios. hØstil is currently doing improv. Techno which is novel in Goiânia, and the hip-hop scene, although very underground, has always been there. But overall the music scene is small, there are barely no venues to play live music at the moment, for example.
Besides its scale I still had a very nice experience during my teens in Goiânia, between 2013 – 2016, which were the early years of Boogarins, and simultaneously when Luziluzia and Carne Docewere starting as well, a fun and vibrant period. There were relatively big festivals such as Bananada, Goiânia Noise, Vaca Amarela (some still happening) that served as meeting points for bands from all across the country. There was also cool D.I.Y. stuff, such as Propósito Records improv. concerts, put together by Bruno Abdala. The scene was tight, I experienced a sense of community, belonging and learned a lot about doing things with what you've got at hand, something I still carry with me. I’m still in touch with almost everybody, specially with the Boogarins members, which are featured on my new album: Dinho Almeida sings on it, Raphael Vaz played bass in some tracks, and I also sampled some drums from Ynaiã Benthroldo.
③Also, in the caption for your first album “Som das Luzis”, you say that you started making music to overcome the pressures of the world that you felt as you grew up from childhood to adulthood. When I listen to it now, what kind of work is this for you, Pedro?
"I love the album and think it’s such a beautiful and dear portrait of who I was back then, when I was 17 - 18 years old. When I think of the title, which in English translates as ‘Sound of Lights’, the colourful stage lights of Martin Cererê, a quintessential stage in Goiânia, comes to my mind. It was there where I saw all my friends play, inspiring me to make music as well. It also reminds me of my first love, partying with friends, and innocence.
④I’d like to know which artists you were listening to enthusiastically when you were making your first album “Som das Luzis”. Personally, I was reminded of Tame Impala’s first album.
Doing 'Som das Luzis' I was very inspired by Boogarins' first album 'As Plantas Que Curam’ (2013), particularly due to the lo-fi sound combined with psych-rock tunes sung in Portuguese. Actually most of the gear they used to record 'As Plantas' I also used in ‘Som das Luzis'. Other important inspirations were Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Mac Demarco, Toro y Moi, Ariel Pink, Connan Mockasin, Grizzly Bear, Dungen and Deerhunter. On the Brazilian side, classics such as Clube da Esquina, Caetano Veloso, Mutantes, Tom Zé but also contemporaries such as Ava Rocha, Negro Leo, Lupe de Lupe and Lê Almeida. Towards the last songs I wrote for it, like 'Feitiços Tropicais' and 'Olhos da Raposa', I dived a bit deeper into Brazilian music but also artists such as Animal Collective, and Flying Lotus, which made me explore the combination of electronics and acoustic instruments as seen on those tracks.
⑤You're not just a musician, but you also actively create illustrations and poems. All of your work is full of color, and it seems to form a whole that represents the person “Pedro Castelhães”. If you were to personally recall the origins of your creative work, what would be the defining moment?
The origin was definitely drawing as a kid, along with a sense of play and messing around, qualities I never quit. My parents always lived outside the city, so I grew up with a big backyard and lots of space to play outside. I loved imagining things on my own, invent games, stories, adventures. I always had a very rich inner world and was very expressive, something thankfully my mom took notice. She enrolled me very early at an art school, which I attended on the side of normal school, and by the age of 10 I was doing professional theatre, touring Brazil with plays. The defining moment that made me start doing music and drawing as a life path, was in High School. I was a terrible student and just couldn’t bear the idea becoming an adult, get a job and loose all the magic and playfulness I experienced as a kid, so music and drawing became my way out. These struggles were documented on ‘Raposa’ my compilation of early recordings released in 2015 as ‘Kastelijns'.
⑥Please tell us about Amsterdam, your other base. First of all, what kind of city is it?
Amsterdam is a very interesting city, but couldn’t be more opposite to Goiânia. It’s full of internationals, with people from all over, so many that you can get around just speaking English. There is a very rich cultural environment, and so many different groups and scenes. It’s also cold, rainy and windy most of the year. The orderly and standardized landscape goes hand in hand with people’s fast passed life and busy agendas, but due to it’s size, organization and scale there is still a village-like atmosphere, which I love. But this charming atmosphere attracts a lot of wealthy people, contributing to high rents and a massive gentrification, making life here very expensive. Individualism and social dryness is also present, making it difficult to build connections.
⑦What kind of scenes can you find in Amsterdam? Please tell us about the inspiration you felt from the city as an artist.
It’s very vibrant. Independently of a scene, there are a lot of museums, galleries, music venues and spaces hosting art and music from all over the world. I saw many things I wouldn’t if I had stayed in Goiânia, widening my references of what art and music could be, making me question my work and how it could fit in an international environment. But even though there was so much going on, it took time for me to find a community. Things changed in 2022, when I finished my album and started looking for musicians to play live. Eventually I met Gabriel de Oliveira, a Brazilian improviser and band leader of Saturno Santos' Something. Gabriel was definitely a door opener for me, taking me to cool music hangs, and introducing me to my current live band qbae, which he leads. Since then I feel like I’m part of a group of creative people again, like I was in Goiânia during my teens, which has paved way for friendships and joint effort to present our work in the Netherlands. The crowd which I’m nowadays part of revolves around the Dutch improvisation scene, as well as "out of the box" pop and folk projects, people like me that are into jazz, experimental stuff, but also song-writing inspired by plural sources and cultures. Some of these people and projects are Beatrice Sberna & Gabriel de Oliveira, Melqui, Tzara the Machine, Ingoma Yesintu, Sara Guidolin, Helena Casella and The Collective Move, to name some. I’m very grateful to be around these people, amazing musicians that inspire me continually, while being able to collaborate with them as well.
⑧How did you go about making your first album in a long time, “Construção”
'Construção' started in 2018, during a drawing assignment at the Rietveld Academie, the art school in Amsterdam where I studied. The assignment involved writing down questions, choose some and "answer" them with drawings. One of my questions “how to build a house and how to live in it?" produced very cool drawing where earth, bricks, cement, pvc tubes and dismembered body parts cohabited houses under construction. Excited with the result I decided to apply the same method with music, and the result were the sketches of what would become ‘Construção'. But it was in 2020, during the Covid Pandemic, that I sat down with all this material and decided to work on an album. Slowly the music unfolded, in parallel to my art studies, which influenced my music and vice versa. Envisioned as a hip-hop album, where the beatmaker sends finished beats to a rapper, I crafted all the instrumentals first and recorded the vocals in one go during a visit to Brazil in 2022, after being four years away from home. The album was mixed and mastered with Alejandra Luciani in 2023 and after gathering enough video and visual material for promotion it got released on November 12, 2024.
⑨What artists were you listening to while you were making 'Construção'?
A lot of Jazz, everything I could put my hands on, classics, 70s Fusion, Spiritual, Jazz-Funk, cheesy things from the 80s and 90s, including those with break beats and new age sounds. Hip-hop, mostly late 90s, early 00s. Brazilian music, mostly 60s to early 80s. Electronic dance music, specially house and some techno. And many people from the current LA scene. There are so many names, to cite a few: Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Lonnie Liston Smith, Bobby Hutcherson, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Outkast, MF Doom, Madlib, Slum Village, Mos Def, Wu Tang, Hermeto Pascoal, Milton Nascimento, Naná Vasconcelos, Itamar Assumpção, Bonobo, Pantha du Prince, Floating Points.
⑩Combined with Alejandra Luciani's mixing and mastering, I get the impression that the sound is much more refined than 'Som das Luzis'. What kind of image/motif did you want to portray with 'Construção'?
In 'Som das Luzis’ I was still learning how to record and produce music, the process was very chaotic and I embraced the lo-fi aesthetic, but with this album I was interested in being as high quality as possible, delivering ideas with sharpness, which was a good exercise. In the mixing process with Alejandra I thought a lot of Goiânia in the dry season as a guiding motif, which made me avoid using reverb as much as possible. In ‘Construção', for example, my voice is very dry, but in a few backing vocals there is reverb. Because everything else is so dry, this specific moment with reverb feels so refreshing, like an unexpected drop of water falling on your forehead during a dry, warm day.
⑪The sound on this album has a modern fusion feel to it, with influences like Thundercat and Pedro Martinez. What kind of change in your feelings did you experience between the last album and this one?
I went into many personal transformations since ‘Som das Luzis' and got into a bunch of new different music, especially Jazz and Hip-Hop, but also Electronica, while diving deeper in Brazilian sounds as well. I just matured, which made my old references not enough. I craved some depth of feeling that I was able to find only in Jazz. 'Contrução' was made trying to combine all those news references with my former background from ‘Som das Luzis'. You mention Thundercat and Pedro Martins, which are definitely big influences: harmonically rich music, often combined with beats and a certain flair of personas more common in pop genres. I think 'Construção' is definitely part of that universe.
⑫On the fifth track of the album, you mention Sun Ra. The phrase “Space is the place” has been used by other artists too, so why did you quote him?
I quoted Sun Ra because it rhymed with ‘sarrá’ which in Portuguese means "to fuck" and I thought it was fun! It comes from a desire to unite two worlds, the far out music and cosmic philosophy of Sun Ra, with the overly sexual and unhinged music of Brazilian Baile Funk.
⑬If there was any inspiration or event that led to the creation of this work, please tell us about it.
That was definitely moving to the Netherlands at the age of twenty, which meant not only stepping into adult but also experiencing a completely different environment. The question “how to build a house and how to live in it?" which informed the making of the album, is a metaphor for the search of physical and emotion shelter I was going trough at the time. In order to 'build a house’ in the highly orderly and standardized Dutch landscape I found inspiration in the precarious urbanization of Brazil, where people address architecture and lack of resources in unorthodox ways, shaping their own realities besides difficulties. These were qualities I used as guiding principles on the making of the album as well as my life since then.
⑭Finally, as a DIY artist, please tell us about your plans for the future.
I’m currently organizing a Brazilian Tour happening February 2025 as well as a European Tour around May 2025 to promote the new album. I’m definitely working on new music as well, which should be out by the of 2025. I'm also keen on deepening the connection between my music and visual work, exploring many different mediums simultaneously.
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