Home

Adriana Vasques

Lyrics at bottom of page

Our sense of time, in this accelerated age of info overload and hyper connectivity is often so divorced from the deeper rhythms of nature and our bodies. Taking time to slow down, and feel that deeper sense of connection, is where Adriana draws inspiration for this small collection of songs.

Adriana Vasques is an Italian who’s as at home with Brazilian music as any non-native, and who’s made London her home where she’s carried the influence of English music in her migration. Despite her consummate skill set as a musician, singer and songwriter, Adriana has had few opportunities to shine her light. Yet she can dazzle with her mastery of an intensely percussive vocal delivery on Brazilian standards such as Joao Bosco’s “Bala Com Bala” or she can usher you into this deeper realm of her abstract introspection.

Adriana is fascinated by time and time signatures, the way we dissect the flow; after all, music is fundamentally this, vibrations in space and time. Unsurprisingly two of these tunes are in more unusual meters

b5 in 5/4 and Bianco in 7/4, and the title track explores this notion more directly… “About Time”.

These are beautiful songs that have that sense of unravelling as they open out into the world, and whereas This Is Me, and All Dressed Up bear the Brazilian influence in fairly obvious ways, these songs bring to mind those English inspirations, The Beatles, Nick Drake, the Canterbury scene. Currents that can also be traced in the music of the Milton Nascimento and Lo Borges, and vice versa.

This EP is very much a collaboration between Adriana and Chris Franck, and Chris’ modus operandi with Adriana was to hone the ideas into their purest forms. Or as Brancusi, the pioneering modernist artist puts it, “simplicity is complexity resolved”. Giving full licence to Adriana to explore the rich seams of her harmonic imagination yet weeding out the superfluous, these songs have been wrought from a glut of ideas and possibilities into these burnished nuggets of sonic art.

Whether in the insistence that they used the demo vocal on b5, knowing that it’s vibe was impossible to reproduce or drawing from Da Lata’s extended family of players to embellish the arrangements, Chris Franck’s skill as a producer continues to grow and flourish with this release. There are horns from Jason Yarde and Finn Peters, Brazilian drummers Marius Rodriguez and Uccio Gaeta feature on a couple of tunes, and Da Lata stalwart and London legend Ernie McKone plays bass on one and nails the slo-mo groove of the title track behind the kit. And through it all, Chris‘ multi-instrumental capacity to find the right colours and textures to compliment Adriana’s songs emanates from these recordings. Deft and poignant synth lines that raise the vibration, subtle percussive interventions that punctuate the flow, and his signature guitar playing as and when necessary.

About Time, because it’s about time more ears get to experience this woman who can channel Joni Mitchell and Elis Regina, Miles Davis and Milton, metabolising those influences into something that is absolutely Adriana Vasques.

Press release by Patrick Forge