To celebrate Loki?’s 50th anniversary, we leave here a master writing by Jotabê Medeiros about this classic, eternally referenced album, Arnaldo’s first solo, released in 1974.

Written in 2017 for the vinyl album, relaunched by Polysom.

By Jotabê Medeiros

Translated by Rebecca Sharp

Loki, the Asgardian god of cheating and madness, couldn’t have predicted such insanity: in 1974, alone with his piano in his room in the Serra da Cantareira, a 26 year old boy, Arnaldo Dias Baptista, which all believed to be disoriented, nurtured the seed of the album which would forever change the face of Brazilian music.

Loki?, the album, was recorded in one single breath, with no repeated takes, at the Eldorado studio, in São Paulo, on 16 channels. The album has 10 tracks and lasts 33 minutes, it does not lend itself to one single guitar riff (a heresy for the times) and merges synthesizers with guitar, orchestral arrangements with clarinet and organ. Its musicality is visionary: there’s sambalanço, glam, British style pop balads, North American rockabilly, MPB, classical and progressive digressions. Invention is the album’s only frontier, but this is not a nerd’s Cartesian experimentalism – Arnaldo non- ceremoniously broke through the doors of perception.

Loki? houses an instrumental journey between Chopin and Elton John in the song “Honky Tonky”, and even a certain orientalism, that slides its way into the blues and arrives at traditional MPB on the 12 string guitar in “É fácil”. Arnaldo is a one man band unfolding himself in search of the right effect, as with the Moog synthesizer in “Desculpe” and “Te Amo, Podes Crer”. When he sings “where is my rock n’ roll”, that is pure Jerry Lee Lewis, until he adds a “I’m going back to Cantareiraaaaaa” which is pure MPB, anarchizing references on the way.

The ex-Mutante had the lucidity (financially supported by Robert Menescal, artistic director of Phillips and Marco Mazzola who produced him) to seek the help he needed. The maestro Rogério Duprat, at the time an ex-tropicalista, abominated what rock had become then: an old guitar, bass and drums formula, a musical label, a limitation of the imagination. Due to this conjecture, he left everything and went to live in a homemade  woodwork shed in Itapecirica da Serra. While carving out two of Aranldo’s songs (“Only One Person” and “You Thinkin’ I’m Crazy?”), he had the feeling there was an entire world yet to unveil. He was our George Martin.

This is a record to be heard on high volume, Arnaldo recommends. No recommendation was needed: the album was so important, it would resonate eternally, while it’s time fell behind. Since January of that year there was an iron fisted new general, Ernesto Geisel, conducting the military dictatorship. This permanent shadow made it so that all the art of that time had a combative, engaged feel to it. Lyrically, Arnaldo chose his own existential anguish as the universe which needed to be understood, and left as his legacy the Bible of an alternative utopia. “We all stay together. Reunited as one person only”, he sang in “You Thinkin’ I’m Crazy?”

Arnaldo’s record came to Earth with an individual esthetic vision, which led him to be compared to Pink Floyd’s Syd Barret. There was no equivalent amongst his contemporaries, as there still isn’t. His original fuel was an amorous delusion, as in 90% of pop, but the result was universal illumination.

In the rest of the world, the promise of a brilliant technological future was hinted at. In that year, Kraftwerk released the classic “Autobahn”. The synthesizer family then received the revolutionary Moog Satellite, which would be very much used by Vangelis on the soundtracks of new movies.

Arnaldo Baptista transcended his dimension, he lived in a spaceship. He had gone to peaks of pop glory with The Mutantes, but as soon as he left the band, he kept his vision way beyond. On the cover photo, with his brown leather pants and no shirt, looking like he’s waiting for someone or something, he seems to be saying he has no voracity for the future nor reverence for the past. He created his reality alone, attached to his dreams and visions, and that is what prevails in Loki?.

Sean Lennon’s and Kurt Cobain’s confessions on the influence that Arnaldo Baptista and The Mutantes’ music had on their work are famous, but the span of influence is wider still, moving through the likes of Devendra Banhart and Kevin Parker from Tame Impala. In Brazil, this influence stretches through generations, noticeable in songs by Boogarins and O Terno.

It is because of this that the Vinyl edition of the album, by Polysom (Universal Music, 180 grams, original art, unpublished sleeve complete with lyrics) is so symbolic: 

Transcendental album, registers the waves of influence of that moment of transition – Arnaldo did this surrounded by his old companions, as if he were doing an intersection. There are support vocals by Rita Lee in two songs  — “Não Estou Nem Aí” (I Don’t Even Care) and “Vou Me Afundar na Lingerie” (I’m gonna drown in Lingerie) – and the musicians are Liminha (bass; Sergio Kaffa plays bass only on “Desculpe”) and Dinho (drums).

Don’t shoot the pianist, is what the posters would read in old Wild West saloons. It was a hard act to follow. In his case, a piano was all he needed to make one of the most fundamental records of Brazilian music.

1-Será Que Eu Vou Virar Bolor?
2-Uma Pessôa Só
3-Não Estou Nem Aí
4-Vou Me Afundar Na Lingerie
5-Honky Tonky
6-Cê Tá Pensando Que Eu Sou Loki?
7-Desculpe
8-Navegar de Nôvo
9-Te Amo Podes Crer
10-É Fácil