Month: April 2015

Glücklich in Brasilien & alegre em Alemanha

Music

There are definitely more links between Brazil and Germany than love to football (which can actually at times turn into mutual hate). Love for Volkswagen and music sounds like a safer bet. I would love to dedicate this post to DJ Rainer Trüby thanks to whom I discovered Brazilian classics and its modern sounds long time ago.

Alongside with Sonar Kollektiv in Berlin and Gilles Peterson in London, he was feeding the audience worldwide with the best of Brazilian sounds by releasing the Glücklich series with the record label Compost Records. Thanks to my colleague who sold me his sound system last week, I could come back to my favourite compilations on CDs (with the legendary fusca on the title page!) and casettes. It’s not that I’m one of those unbearable Berliner hipsters, it’s just that I still have my radioshows from the 90s/early 2000s recorded there. And Shazam does not recognize all of the tracks, and nor have my über-musical friends so far.

While researching a bit more about what he’s been up to lately, I’ve come across this interview which I find pretty interesting (even though it’s in Spanish, not in Portuguese!):

As days become more longer, warmer and simply: happier here, my soul needs more upbeat rhythms and to make this positivity to an unbearable level. Although Brazilian music seems to be universal, and especially recommended while being down, and facing worse days in life.

The unforgettable Glücklich compilations can be found here:

It offers a wide selection of the Afro-Luso-Brazilian, MPB, samba and most importantly, the contemporary fusion, also with the European producers. One of my favourites – “Bohemian” by MURO (in Bah Samba’s remix) is actually sung in English and was one of the first EPs where I discovered the overwhelmingly powerful voice of Alice Russell. “Direction? Changing myself, keep moving… all around the world”.

fusca – Volkswagen ‘Beetle’, extremely popular in Brazil from 60s till now.

A minha vida em português

Personal

There is no other language that makes my soul happy as much as Portuguese does. Even that nowadays I discover the beauty (ja!) and funny particularities in German and meet amazing people here, I feel that a part of me belongs still somewhere else. But it’s no longer just an empty feeling of longing aka saudade, it’s rather enriching and empowering on various occasions.

In other words, it motivates me a lot to understand and be understood till some extentent in the language I once thought impossible to learn (German) but still think and feel in Portuguese when it comes to certain things, even though I am not a native speaker. Just as friends can become our family of choice, I believe strongly that for linguistic freaks foreign languages can play a similar role!

Also, I caught myself speaking with my Brazilian colleague passing to English ‘when it comes to business’ and leaving Portuguese for purely fun times. I unconsciously bump into the Brazilians and speak about piadas and bagunças long hours. Same goes for Spanish, but that’s another story.

Well, I am not alone, and finally I discovered a documentary film which connects the most interesting aspects of this language: Lingua – Vidas em Português.

Multilayered, spoken over different parts in Europe, Americas, Asia and Africa, Portuguese is now not only a language that came from the colonial ancestry, but that has merged different races, roots, tribes and geographical locations.

My father used to tell me long time ago that both the Southern hemisphere and the Portuguese language are the future of our globe. He was a visionary and extremely wise person with a capacity to predict different economical processes long before. He was thus always pushing me towards learning this niche language back in a day, as he believed that I will  succeed somewhere in this big world.

It was a great revelation to see how Portuguese language has shaped the lives of others, but most importantly, to know that I am not the only one to feel the multicultural and ethnical particularity which probably no other widely-spoken language of nowadays has.