So much for exoticism: pronounced in the French style, Bruno Berle may sound more like a bank advisor or an old school friend rather than a Brazilian singer. But that’s where he’s good, and how we ended up discovering him two years ago with the album No Reino dos Afetos. A gentle new wave from Brazil, and more precisely from Maceió, on the northeast coast of the great country, a long way (some 2,000 kilometres) from Rio de Janeiro and the most visited tourist spots in Brazilian music. Bruno Berle’s music is rooted in the MPB (Brazilian popular music) tradition, with samba rhythms and dry guitars that make you dance with wet eyes. This is how he often appears on stage, solo, armed with just his soulful voice, his acoustic guitar, and his armoury of songs that could have blossomed half a century ago, with their faultless classicism. The fifth track on the album, O Nome de Meu Amor was voted one of the most beautiful songs in the world in 2022.
But young Bruno Berle (initials BB), composer and multi-instrumentalist, embodies this style’s contemporary future. With another BB of the same ilk, his partner Batata Boy, multi-instrumentalist and co-producer of the album, he doesn’t just cultivate the natural nostalgia of MPB. He takes his songs into the realms of electronica and lo-fi production, swathes them in sound effects, draws inspiration from dream pop psychedelia, and allows himself the mistakes and wanderings that make his music so delicately beautiful. Nothing is square or fixed in BB’s songs, which resemble fuzzy postcards.
Since No Reino dos Afetos, Bruno Berle has left his home province to settle in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. Open to new encounters and new sounds, he recorded a second album simply entitled No Reino dos Afetos 2. A natural and supernatural follow-up to the first volume, with a little more groove, for dancing with sticky legs and arms raised to the heavens.
