Imagine a movie montage culled from the frames of Federico Fellini’s La Strada and Roger Vadim’s kitschy 1968 sci-fi fantasy Barbarella set to the lush musings of a smoky-voiced Brazilian siren cooing in Portuguese. Now picture the scene unraveling at Coney Island’s Astroland staring an actress on a Freudian carousel ride of her innermost salacious acts.
It may sound contrived, but for São Paulo, Brazil, trio 3 Na Massa (3 In the Dough), the idea to penetrate the female libido through music stemmed from such visual mash-ups. One part Rica Amabis, the producer behind São Paulo hip-hop collective Instituto, and two parts Pupillo and Dengue, members of the seminal Recife rock outfit Naçao Zumbi, 3 Na Massa began sampling sonic driftscapes on a computer in their shared quarters before finally making it seamless in the studio.
“It became natural,” Amabis says of the creative process. “We didn’t have to talk much. We actually knew what each of us was going to do.”
The result is a record fashioned as a kind of confessional soundtrack to the erotic comic book frames of Italian artist Milo Manara. Piled with layers of references that range from Brazilian filmmaker Hugo Khouri to the voluptuous sonic contours of Serge Gainsbourg, the record shows the threesome’s close attention to detail. Even the intimate dialogues of amorous encounters were penned by various songwriters, among them Rodrigo Amarante, Recife composer Juno Barreto and Mamelo Sound System singer Rodrigo Brandao. 3 Na Massa then enlisted female singers and actresses, including friend and newcomer chanteuse CéU, Orquestra Imperial’s Thalma de Freitas, Brazilian soap opera star Karine Carvalho and City of God’s Alice Braga, to create vocal personas for each of the album’s storylines.
“We had this idea to use actresses that never sang,” Amabis says. “We thought it would sound more visual than if we just used singers. There’s a slight difference because actresses put a character on. It also created different points of view, musically.”
Nublu Records is releasing the tightly crafted, 13-track full-length next spring. In the meantime, 3 Na Massa plans on teasing us with a seductive EP available by the end of the year.
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