Flavia Coelho - GINGA [CD]

[PIAS] Le Label

£10.80

Format: CD
Catalogue No.: PIASLL230CD
Barcode: 5400863161798
Release Date: 31 May 2024
Genre: International

Praise for Flavia Coelho

“This is a helping of pure sunshine… Coelho is creating her very own world music” – The Sunday Times

“This is music anchored by positivity, with great melodies and broad appeal” – Songlines

Brazilian artist Flavia Coelho today announces the release of her fifth album ‘GINGA’ out on May 31st, 2024 via [PIAS] Le Label. The singer also shares the first single ‘Mama Santa’ a track about facing up to life's trials and tribulations, constantly rebuilding oneself, taking care of one's wounds, believing in oneself and in the woman who reveals herself over time.

Flavia Coelho hypnotises us right from the start with her song ‘Mama Santa’, a nod to her mother. The Garota do Rio, who took the French music scene by storm in 2011 to prove to her father that she was a true artist.

Flavia Coelho is continuing her exploration of identity and her quest for authenticity, tackling the themes of reconstruction, courage, and resilience, with her loyal producer and arranger Victor Vagh-Weinmann, whom she met in her early days in France. Together, they initiated and designed all the compositional material, electro pads, organs, keyboards, guitars, and percussion. These ingredients, combined with the catchy melodies and sublime voice of the bewitching Flavia, have given life to the ten nuggets of ‘GINGA’.

The writing of this new opus began two years ago, after a key phrase, heard by the artist: "We live our first twenty years, then the next twenty serve to understand the first twenty.” 43-year-old Flavia Coelho has precisely reached this stage in her life.

To create ‘GINGA’, the singer immersed herself in all the music of her youth, particularly South American songs from kitschy telenovelas. Then Flavia recorded her ideas on her Dictaphone, and began writing and producing her songs in the studio between August and December 2023, in a vital urgency, like a personal challenge to be taken up and a typically "Coelhian" saudade, bursting with emotion.

Funk, house, Latin American, samba, reggae and amapiano, in ‘GINGA’, Flavia Coelho fuses genres and heritages, orchestrated with varying degrees of sensuality and vibrancy, the fruit of over a hundred hours of recording. For the first time, Flavia Coelho has entrusted the mixing of her album to renowned collaborators, as if she needed to entrust her work to them and take a step back to give a whole new dimension to the songs that are so close to her. Tom Fire, Prince Fatty, Paul from Synapson and Guts were given the delicate task of mixing the final version of the album.

Flavia takes flight and takes us on a journey, from Brazil to London via Provence, Paris and everywhere in between. ‘GINGA’ is a sharpened set of legs that takes us through the sound system of Flavia Coelho's life, while continuing to accompany our own.

Mainly sung in Portuguese, ‘GINGA’ is dedicated to the music that marked her adolescence, in other words, the sound from the early 90s to the 2000s that Flavia Coelho listened to repeatedly, sometimes in secret, on the little radio her father had given her to help her fall asleep.

On the contrary, for little Flavia, every night was a fiesta, awake until 2am, listening to international club music, DJ sets and remixes in bed with the transistor radio glued to her ear. She discovered the art of production, the subtlety of certain harmonies, the magic of melodies, and was already imagining herself on stage, like her idols, Madonna, Michael Jackson, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, and all the great Brazilian artists of the time... Not forgetting Corona, the singer, not the beer! She was amazed when Flavia Coelho discovered that the singer of her anthem, "The Rhythm of the Night" - her real name was Jenny Bersola - was, like her, Brazilian!

Everything felt possible now; Flavia Coelho would become a singer. For two years, she earned a living performing all those Anglo-Saxon hits that she learnt by heart, phonetically, without speaking a word of English. The 90s represented a major musical and political upheaval in the singer's life.

From 1964 to 1985, Brazil was under military dictatorship, and Flavia Coelho, born in 1980, was part of the generation that was able to enjoy music from all over the world, without selection, censorship, or barriers, thanks to the arrival of free radio stations. Flavia Coelho's own radio station was Radio Fluminense, an hour of music a day from which she drew her first inspiration. This period also coincided with a pivotal and painful stage in her personal life.

The beginning of young Flavia's adolescence was particularly complicated, marked by the death of her mother at the age of 11, and the obligation to live with her father. Her father, a former soldier and music lover, was the opposite of the festive spirit and feminist and LGBT activism embodied by her mother, a make-up artist and hairdresser who was the queen of nightlife.

Flavia Coelho has built her career on a combination of rigour, freedom and openness to the world and all kinds of music, from English pop rock, to classical music. Flavia Coelho's entire discography is based on her personal evolution, from spirited, dreamy teenager to sparkling, committed young woman. The story of her previous album, ‘DNA’, released in 2019, began when she was 38, precisely the age her mother was when she died. An album that Flavia Coelho naturally devoted to what she describes as "the egg", in other words, her origins, but also the richness of crossbreeding, self-acceptance and transmission, echoing at the same time the political situation in Brazil under Bolsonaro at the time.

TRACKLISTING:
Mama Santa
Nordestina
Mais Amor
Lapa
Passageiro
Nosso Lar
Sistema Solar
Tamarindo
De Vous À Moi
Bira