Video Premiere (!) Fantasma do Cerrado – Anhangaretá
12.05.23 by Matty McPherson
“Holiday Time” is an official designation that you can sort of prescribe to what’s going on right now in America. Cars with blood red noses and fuzzy faux reindeer horns, fake plastic trees, post-cyber monday deals, and (this year) a suspicious lack of snow and Mariah Carey music. Perhaps because the local Mall’s Nordstrom closed leaving Target the last real player in the game? Leaving the ghosts to have taken over the other outlets?
If there’s anything to take note of from my ramble, it’s that the Tabs Out gang is still slowly chipping away at our giant list. I’m crossed between a stack of digitals and a pile of 2023 tapes that continue to push me to my own outer limits. All the while, I’ve been taking Fantasma do Cerrado’s Mapeamento de Terras a Noroeste de São Paulo de Piratininga for spins once more. A silky smooth blurring of the lines between field recordings, travelogue, and psychedelic folk showed another side to “barely known villages of the São Paulo State inlands”. It too, has ghosts that’d make the average American mall’s poof up.
Well, in a stroke of wonderful timing when Rafael Stan Molina, the artist behind the project + the Municipal K7 collective, hit our line with this novel gloaming of a video/field recording into to the world of Mapaeamento de Terras! You won’t find Anhangaretá on the cassette, but its presence feels natural and like a spectre to the entire tape. A welcome epilogue, or asynchronous extension from Rafael that only furthers the power the No. 3 best tape of 2022 had last year. I was more than overjoyed to have a chance to bring this out to the Tabs Out audience as an invitation to ‘Termas de Ibirá’, a district of the city of Ibirá, northwest of the São Paulo State.
Front of the abandoned hotel on the cover of the first album at an eternal 3am during recording session, Rafael nails the elliptical uncertainty of dread. The kind that flowed like water from the best experiments of early 2010s Marble Hornets in the SE United States. If you appreciate the crunch of that era of youtube walking videos, there’s a real ominous dread that Rafael captures here. Filmmaker Natália Reis (https://vimeo.com/sanguecorsario) helped realize the final edition featured here.
From Rafael about the title: The name ‘Anhangaretá’ roughly means ‘Many Ghosts’ in Tupi language (the language of the branch of natives that inhabited the region). To be perfectly honest I couldn’t be sure if the term is precise, but looks like. I’m sure that ‘Anhangá’ is accepted for ‘ghosts’ (even though the use of the natives look like for some specific ghost, there are different versions about which ghost) and ‘etá’ is ‘many’, and the construction of the word feels right.
Indeed Rafael. And with that, a gentle reminder to pick up one of the last 9 copies on the Municipal K7 bandcamp