Opening windows onto the best music that you’ve never heard, the latest reveal from Hive Miind Records is another ambitious and, in some ways, risky release. Working with Rio based independents QTV Selo Records they’ve taken up the challenge of curating a retrospective of prolific Brazilian experimentalist Negro Leo’s work over the last fifteen years and arrived at ‘White Elephant’, a dazzlingly chaotic, care-free compilation.

Leonardo Campelo Gonçalves, aka Negro Leo, has amassed a back catalogue of some fourteen albums, singles and EPs since he took the musical plunge in 2012. With a background as a sociologist his songs were never going to be sugar coated but charged with political thrust, driven by insight and shaped by complexity. The orthodox has always been out with Leo Negro’s music, a singular, shifting concoction of MPB, agit punk, noise improv, no-wave, latin-funk and art-rock but there’s no better place to start grappling with the scale of it than ‘White Elephant’.

Always intriguing and at times inscrutable, the album sprawls out in front of you, like viewing a metropolis from on high but once you have landed inside the rush is intense. Fittingly the collection begins at the beginning with the title track from his 2012 debut ‘Newspeak’. It’s a brief opening statement, a manifesto scene setter set starkly to Negro Leo’s wavering tenor and angular acoustic plucks. There’s a chill within the surrealism here. “Gazing the military, gazing the millinery” he faux-croons with a bite of disdain.

Scrolling forward in years Dutch West India Company follows, taken from a 2021 sound-installation collab with his partner artist Ava Rocha. Within this noire-jazz, neo-soul slow mover the sharp protesting continues with unsettling realism. “Know him, homeless eyes” Negro Leo pleads, his voice a quivering falsetto amongst the reverse tapes, piano stabs and rubbery bass. It’s a song which like much of his music defies easy definition as it unravels with a Tom Ze level of surprise.

Political provocation has fired much of Negro Leo’s prolific output and that zeal powers the urgency and simmering anger that underpins this retrospective. The free form looseness of The Last unicorn intriguingly singles out “General Motors General Electrics” for attention as some no-wave chord-ology cuts and thrusts dangerously. Then there’s no oil enough from 2017’s Coisado album which carries the same malevolent angst as those early Bovell/ Pop Group encounters.

Although social justice is the force behind his work this dizzying documentary album also underlines Negro Leo’s musical flare and significance as an innovator. He has always taken the experimental spirit of the Tropicalia era and carved his own path alongside his leftfield contemporaries Thiago Nassif, Domenico Lancellotti, Ricardo Dias Gomes and Kiko Dinucci. ‘White Elephant’ cleverly embraces the breadth of the Negro Leo soundscape. Across a hefty twenty seven tracks you’ll find maximum agit and angular post punk funk with the likes of the muscular Ilhas de Calor from 2014 or the horn stabbing thrust of Hey Steven. For gentler moments (on the Negro Leo scale) check out the lilting strum of Marcha Para Longe complete with its Os Mutantes psyched up surge or the shambling rugged bossa of Lek lover which disintegrates brilliantly. Tellingly the collection closes with the pensive honesty of Esferas and shows Negro Leo at his most melodic and exposed.

Listening through the whole of ‘White Elephant’ does take some stamina but this is purely because of the avalanche of musical ideas that hit you, not only from track to track but within each song itself. Take Fera Mastigada which unfolds as a woozy dream-soaked ballad but then edgily descends into a squabble of voices. Or encounter the brash concrete jazz of Coisado where brittle samples razor across the mix of vamping piano and burbling synths.

The album also highlights the continuing evolution of Negro Leo’s music. The later songs from 2020 onwards show him as a listener and assimilator as well as an innovator with the introduction of programming, electronics and sampling. tmf is starkly confrontational, a thrilling sound clash of agit-rap and abstract jungle with echoes of Death Grips and Dälek, while SACRIFY, SINTONIZA, QUE LOUCURA and CaC Cac Cac briskly deliver mesmirising glitch interludes. Complex, layered hyperpop is explored on the synth-soaked ONLINE AGORA and the autotuned lush samba of ME ENSINA A TE CASTIGAR which swirls with an Animal Collective abandon. As always though Negro Leo forges his own kind of maximal soundscape as on RELA (feat. May Tuti), where transcendent marching beats meet falsetto spiked nu-soul and clattering gnawa percussion.

Some might say that as a compilation the tracks could have been more helpfully presented in historical order but the mixed programming helps the album stand alone as much more than an interesting artefact. ‘White Elephant’ is a valuable portal onto Negro Leo’s enduring music and an essential celebration of this artist’s under-valued vision.

Get your copy of ‘White Elephant‘ by Negro Leo from your local record store or direct from Hive Mind Records HERE

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