Modo Avião

"Welcome aboard..."

Airplane mode. The title of Lucas Santtana's new album is no accident. From the very first seconds, we are invited to board a sound fiction with him, a narrative at the heart of his thoughts, private convictions and subtle sensations. Welcome aboard, then. And what a trip this story is, inviting us both to travel and to disconnect. "More than a concept album, Modo Avião is an experience. It's a journey that lets you disconnect from the world for a few minutes. Like a break without a cell phone or a computer. Something medical and meditative." Reading between the lines, it is clearly time to rest in an exhausted society. "It's a reflection on which path to follow tomorrow. Taking the time to think, to understand who we are and where we stand. And the answer lies outside binary logic, yes or no..." It lies more in the gray areas, the gray matter, of our brains.

Human, all too human: these are the people this Bahia native, raised in Rio and now based in São Paulo, sings about, in a voice that is often gentle, sometimes a little bitter. What he offers is a time of rest, a pause without a pose, through some twenty sound vignettes that alternate songs and conversations, witty exchanges and the poetry of sound. Between the lines lies a critique of the consumer society: in the age of Internet 3.0, which demands constant connection and tracks our desires into every corner, it was high time to think about it. "This album is made of songs and scenes, like a feature-length sound film without images. Silent film already existed. Mine is a blind film," jokes Lucas Santtana, one of the most accomplished songwriters in contemporary Brazil. Over six albums and more than fifteen years, he has stood out for writing, both musical and lyrical, that is quite unique in Brazilian popular music, drawing on many influences, from melancholy pop to abstract minimalism.

This time, Lucas Santtana composed all the raw material on acoustic guitar, then reshaped it with Fabio Pinczowski, the album's co-producer. With them are a few guests, actors and musicians including Lucas Vasconcellos, Rodrigo Campello and Arthur Dutra, and a string quartet, all in tune with a soundtrack that sidesteps a few clichés and plays out at a rather laid-back tempo. "These songs call for a relaxed state of mind. And the lyrics are more poetic, more conducive to dreaming." Not to escape reality, quite the opposite, but to offer a version of it less in line with today's views, hammered home by screens that print black-and-white truths without trying to see beyond, into the nuances.

In the loneliness of the human herd, Lucas Santtana invites us into a poetics of relationship, with others and with our own ego, and a search for otherness as a synonym for humanity. "Today, no one can ride an elevator for 20 seconds without checking their phone. Why? To hide a violent need? A hole? A huge lack? Of what? The character of Modo Avião is on that search... to understand where the hole is." So he wanders on, and we with him, to a soundtrack where we can't quite tell what is daydream and what is transfigured virtuality. This record, as much as a journey, is a precious moment to open the way to our dreams, the only place, the only moment, still protected from every demand for profitability. "Sleep is capitalism's last unexplored territory. Yet we only dream when we sleep, and how often do we wake up feeling that the dream was so real. I'd like the people who stop to listen to Modo Avião to have that same feeling. That they were in another space, in another time."

Close your eyes, open your ears wide: this other, most sensitive world is still possible.