Cuidado Madame

When people talk about Arto Lindsay’s body of work, they often project a clear dichotomy. There is Scary Arto and Sexy Arto.

Scary Arto’s music is stormy and serrated and ruthless and almost deranged; evoking perhaps the glare and noise of New York City. Sexy Arto’s music is seductive and warm and textured and ethereal; evoking perhaps the dappled sunlight of Brazil. Both musics seem dreamlike. There are many kinds of dreams.



In 2014, Ponderosa Music & Art issued a unique and conceptually provocative double-disc anthology of Arto’s solo work, called “Encyclopedia Of Arto”. Disc 1 was a “Best of Arto Lindsay” survey of his solo albums. Disc 2 was something much more unusual: many of the same songs from disc one, performed live with Arto's signature haywire noise guitar (Scary Arto) juxtaposed against his lilting, slyly erotic, post-Caetano vocal style (Sexy Arto).The choice to marry Sexy and Scary into a single performance was striking and bold. I cannot speak for Arto, but my read of the statement was that it rebuked the notion that his vision is somehow binary. It felt like fresh terrain.

This brings us to Cuidado Madame, the long awaited new album, where Arto’s mastery is in full bloom. Though the album certainly favors Sexy Arto, its fearlessness makes us let go of our boring, dichotomous ideas. On offer is the full, inimitable Arto Lindsay range of texture, noise, technology, ensemble playing, melody and poetry, sensuality and intellect.You will find that you stop analyzing and parsing. You will find that you surrender. To many kinds of dreams.