Dezoito is a very interesting album, filled with intriguing noises, contrasts, sonorous experimentations and uplifting twisting beats. Nonetheless, given the length and the nature of each one of these tracks, I strongly recommend you to listen to each one of them separately and calmly, after you listen to the whole album, which will be a far more enjoyable experience, since each one of these tracks appear to be grounded in a very artistic, experimental and fearless exploratory field of work.
Undoubtedly appearing to be a very methodical work, sometimes lucid, sometimes more hallucinatory, Jobim obviously like to explore the vastness of his musical proficiency, astoundingly studying possibilities in a noisy and protuberating soundscape, establishing for himself no limits or boundaries. On his interesting approach to songwriting, composition and execution, he clearly sees the result of what he is doing. Nonetheless, given his astounding levels of experimentation – and obvious despise for commercial appeal, which would be no surprise at all for such a fearless and skilled underground artist – and the fact that his major influences are misunderstood and audacious electronic acts from the past, his music is confined to a very restrict audience, with the hopes of being understood and properly appreciated only to a handful of eccentric enthusiasts.
But his music really has interesting potential, abilities and capacities, apparently built in a very cohesive diagram of techniques, sounding joyful, modest, playful and exhilarating at the same time. Despite the whole album being charged with a magnificent sphere of lucid sensitivity, the first two tracks set the groundbreaking standards here. The second one, The Road, really impersonates a beautiful and relinquishing atmosphere, subsumed by an 80’s nostalgia, that captures you, and never leaves you unannounced or lost at the center of its own free styled rhythms. Filled with interesting references and influences from the experimental and electro scene of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, this album reevaluates the musical proficiency of electronica in a more vast panel, properly diluted in a style that reinvigorates a fresh sobriety into harmonies that admonishes a sonorous galaxy of possibilities like only a handful of artists are capable of really doing it right, in the whole history of the electronica genre, and its multiple subgenres.
Filled with a great multitude of layers, albeit his music can be described as static to a certain degree, given the fact that one main rhythm can be predominant throughout a whole track, Dezoito, by Gustavo Jobim, certainly is an interesting sonorous experience, that will certainly enlarge your personal concept about electronica experimental music, and will surround you with a nostalgia feeling – if you are familiarized with the genre, of course – for such magical moments that this album, in the end, will make you search for more works of this fascinating, exquisite, eccentric but very inventive, creative and audacious artist.
Wagner