brazilianaires by john oswald

BRAZILIANAIRES, John Oswald's plunderphonics-imbued radio play, which shocked its sponsors, was finally allowed to be broadcast on European airwaves in 1996. This followed months of dismay and accusations of 'unprofessionalism'. It hasn't been heard since, until now.

Oswald's part in the radio play is performed by legendary road-movie queen evolved into formidable writer director Valerie Buhagiar. The libretto-like script, portrayed in four interwoven languages by native speakers, is an autofictional (with lots of cars) account of Oswald's surreal real life whirlwind trip to Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasilia in 1993.

The translations into approximate english of all the spoken words are included in the lyric pop-ups for each track

Bonus items include the original quadralingual script, and an alignment soundfile— originally the first track on the CD presented to the Dutch and Canadian radio networks: to test stereo and monophonic broadcast signals. The pink noise present in the signal, like various sounds in the program is in out-of-phase stereo (shades of Jimi Hendrix) should disappear completely in mono, revealing underlying program material. In this release we've approached this differently in the streaming tracks as compared to the bonus track which is the complete program undivided into separate scenes; which we speculate will be preferable for some listeners.

Tracklist

1.	brazilianaires theme	2:30

2.	intro	0:31

3.	the softcore nitemare	0:37

4.	a call from Hilversum to Toronto	1:33

5.	starting tomorrow	0:55

6.	passengers to Brasilia please remain on board	0:57

7.	all the streets are freeways	1:16

8.	can Brazandia here?	0:15

9.	Pizza Disc — all vinyl	0:34

10.	fancy alien-wear for grocery-shopping	0:53

11.	a truncated black pyramid	1:05

12.	a downbeat in anything	1:05

13.	I have nothing to say and i'm saying it	0:54

14.	a cultivated jungle	0:42

15.	tracing its waffled shape in sound	1:32

16.	the first notes of dawn	1:00

17.	Sennecade	1:31

18.	opposite directions	0:55

19.	music research	1:01

20.	me tira daqui	2:01

21.	she drives us to the ocean	4:27

22.	nothing to declare	1:15

23.	brazilianaires theme coda	2:19

Credits

released November 3, 1996

written, directed & recorded by John Oswald (1996)
Valerie Buhagiar plays John Oswald
David Haverscheid plays the Germans
Leon Kaplan plays the Brazilians
Barbara Noske plays the Dutch Radio producer
Catherine Duncanson coos & screams
commissioned by the NOS (1993)

cover photo originally by Joana França

License

CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.