Ed Motta - Toc-Toc (full album)

After more than a decade dedicating his original work to an English-language repertoire, Ed Motta returns to recording in Portuguese language with a sound inspired by 1980s electro-funk.

Ed Motta has been one of Brazil’s most successful singers for three and a half decades. Throughout his long career, the “Colossus of Rio”—as he is affectionately known in his homeland—has absorbed a wide variety of styles, from bossa nova to hard rock, funk, soul, jazz, and fusion, as well as various forms of pop, repeatedly blending them into new combinations that coalesce into an unmistakable whole thanks to his voice, which is as gentle as it is powerful. With his latest opus, “Toc-Toc,” he is now embarking on a fresh start under the motto “Back to the Future.” Strictly speaking, it is a journey through time and space—or rather, through many eras and just as many places. On the one hand, there’s the echo of many great legends of Brazilian pop music from the 1960s to the present, but the songs also encompass elements of funk, synth-pop, and electronica. Motta distills all of this into a statement about the present, in which he simply swaps the traditional roles of the past and the future. Specifically, Ed Motta’s goal was to bring two completely different areas of contemporary music together into a cohesive whole. “Electronic music and traditional songwriting are usually mutually exclusive,” explains Motta. “I wanted to find a way to connect these two musical forms in unexpected ways. It’s not electronic music per se, because my songs follow a different dramatic structure, but everything is recorded using a drum machine and a bass synthesizer. With my songs, I want to reach a place that doesn’t yet exist.”

There is hardly any other voice in the universe that has such a soothing, empathetic effect on the human spirit as Ed Motta’s timbre. And yet he is a quiet rebel who defies all musical formulas and commercial rules. Nothing could be further from the Brazilian’s mind than treading well-worn Latin paths, of whatever variety. Deep in his heart, Motta remains a passionate songwriter; the electronic elements on his new album, however, are the garments in which he dresses his imagination. The vibe of his songs draws primarily on the tight funk of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Motta cites American ’70s icons like Cameo and the S.O.S. Band to illustrate the source of his inspiration. “As a teenager, I was incredibly impressed by this music, and today I’m searching for that energy again,” says Motta. “I look back in order to move forward. It’s a game with memory. Back then, this music was constantly playing on the radio. Before I started collecting records, the radio was my main influence. That’s long gone, but life goes on. I have to find new ways to bring that energy back.”

The album arrives on platforms September 25th, with vinyl following on October 16th.
Feel free to share the official link: https://mps.lnk.to/Toc-Toc