Listening to the new album from Brazil’s Deafkids, Cicatrizes Do Futuro, I’ve been thinking about rivers.
[indignant voice from the back]: WHAT?
Mea culpa, friend. I’m here today to preach the gospel of
Under the banner of Deafkids, the duo of Douglas Leal and Marian Sarine makes music that is unabashedly polyglot, with roots in punk, noise, industrial, and electronic music, in addition to the wealth of Afro-Caribbean percussion and rhythms so pervasive in Brazilian music. My first encounter with the band was Metaprogramação, their excellent 2019 full-length for Neurot. Since then, the band has released a slew of live albums and collaborations (including 2020’s also-excellent Deafbrick with Iggor Cavalera’s noise/electronic project Petbrick), but Cicatrizes Do Futuro (Scars of the Future) is their first unaccompanied album in seven years.
Rather than keep the listener in suspense about what might be in store, Cicatrizes Do Futuro starts exactly as it means to go on: “Parasita” opens with a heavily distorted vocal sample, hypnotically pounding percussion, blown-out synth bass, and eventually a nervy twang of a main guitar riff that tumbles along a 3/4-rhythm that becomes a two-step. The minimal vocals that crop up are chopped and reverbed almost beyond recognition, so that like everything else they become entirely focused on what’s happening now, not next. Another way of getting at this is to say that the album sprawls like a single, grooved-out jam session, a psychedelic feast of drums and claps and shouts and 808 kicks – and was that birdsong? – with individual phrases or licks or rhythms bubbling up only for as long as they are useful.
“Reflexo” pulses with dizzying polyrhythms, cutting out midway through for scrambled vocal cuts and diced up synth, and while “Profecia” heats up after its sly dub feint of an opening, it tumbles down the line as one of the (relatively) more restrained pieces on the album. Cicatrizes Do Futuro is an album that feels like it would be equally appropriate as soundtrack for an old-school skateboard video as for a David Attenborough documentary on the despoilment of communal waterways. Your own personal constellation of reference points is sure to differ, but here’s a partial map of how the album hits for me:
l-r, top: Miles Davis/Dark Magus; Atoms for Peace/Amok; Sepultura/Roots; Neurosis/The Word as Law \\ l-r, middle: Ratos de Porão/Crucificados pelo Sistema; Skinny Puppy/Too Dark Park; Boredoms/Super Ae; The Prodigy/The Fat of the Land \\ l-r, bottom: Matias Aguayo/Support Alien Invasion; Einstürzende Neubauten/Halber Mensch
The good news about this is that the band sounds like so many different things that they end up sounding like no one thing except Deafkids. Nevertheless, I think the connection to Miles Davis’s 1974 live album Dark Magus is both unintuitive and instructive. Like Deafkids, at this point in his career, Miles was focused on long, dense, trance-like groove and rich textural interplay rather than the individual and collective displays of virtuosity of the hard bop scene. In fact, Miles’s trumpet is one of the least-heard instruments throughout many of his recordings from this time – he spent just as much time needling the band with short phrases and licks on his Yamaha organ as he did torquing his trumpet through effects pedals.
In that way, to listen to Dark Magus as primarily a trumpet album sets one up for a similar disappointment as if you listen to Cicatrizes Do Futuro as a guitar album. Instead, both albums feel like inherently recombinant experiments, with the magic being how engrossing and self-contained they feel. The A-side highlight “Advertencia” has a wonderfully gnarled drone riff that snakes and curls through the underbrush, driving the song into a lingering, noise-fracked drone conclusion. “Possessão Coletiva” is the longest song on the album, and it makes use of that extra runway to slink a little slower and really burrow into the subconscious. The guitar that gradually pokes its way into the song’s final third might as well be a didgeridoo, and I swear there’s the faintest bit of flute off in the distance, all of which speaks to the hallucinatory effect of Deafkids’ unwavering commitment to the heady psychedelia of deep groove.
Although very few sounds on the album are not tweaked, chopped, distorted, and manipulated in some way, neither the effect nor the intent of the album seems particularly aggressive. Instead, like a canoe in a swift-moving river, it feels like an invitation to move one’s body in harmony with the flow. That doesn’t guarantee a smooth ride, but it may still be the right attitude to cultivate. The album closer “Em Transe” maximizes the effectiveness of the overlay of electronic kick drums, hand percussion, and bass synth to drive the listener into a state of feverish dancefloor hypnosis while a snarling guitar crush threatens to tip into total chaos. It doesn’t, though, because unlike an ocean’s cresting, crashing waves, Deafkids’s music follows the river’s model of crescendo without climax.
Cicatrizes Do Futuro is an album that sounds like a river, like that paradox of endless movement by which it is always and never the same thing. Deafkids’ origin in the southeastern Brazilian city of Volta Redonda is a few thousand kilometers from the Amazon River basin, but their music feels marked by the water’s current. The press materials for the album quote the band as saying, “Our music comes from the perception of the environmental, political, and moral toxicity that permeates our realities…” This is reflected through in their lyrics, as on album opener “Parasita”:
“E se houver um amanhã / A nos observar / É pintado de sangue!”
(“And if there’s a tomorrow / To bear witness to us / It’s a blood-soaked one”)
The writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, writes about how she had to shift her mindset when trying to learn Potawatomi, a language in which many phenomena we know in English as nouns are instead treated as verbs: “A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa – to be a bay – releases the water from bondage and lets it live. ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores… Because it could do otherwise – become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too” (Kimmerer 2013, p. 55).
Through this lens, through this failure to learn what Kimmerer calls the “grammar of animacy,” the environmental degradation that Deafkids are (at least in part) lamenting on Cicatrizes stems from humans seeking mastery over the thingness of nature instead of learning to hear and live alongside the personness of nature. On “Reflexo,” the lyrics are pointed:
“Beba das águas / Do rio que seca / A sua sede / É o meu reflexo”
(“Drink the waters / Of the drying river / Your thirst / Is my reflection”)
I doubt that Deafkids intended to evoke the feeling of a river with Cicatrizes Do Futuro, but now I can’t shake the feeling. One way to think about your relationship with a place is to reflect on the waters that feed and flow through it. “Feitiço” opens with chanted vocals and distorted tin-sounding drums, but when the electronic beats come in, the synth pads sound like thick raindrops radiating concentric circles that swiftly merge with the sleepless flow. This way of hearing is also a way of seeing, and it reminds me of Robert Macfarlane’s recent book, Is a River Alive?:
“Hold the map of your country in your mind. Imagine it now entirely blacked out except for the rivers and streams: these alone are present. Let them glow in vivid colours… A new topography leaps to the eye. The land is suddenly intricately veined… The pattern repeats, then repeats again with each scale-shift: a fractal branching of tributaries and channels, fronds and stems. It resembles the vascular system. It resembles a neural network” (Macfarlane 2025, p. 23).
Curiously enough, it wasn’t until I nearly finished writing about this riverine album that I remembered a piece of art that hangs on my office wall:
Growing up in the Twin Cities, the Mississippi River was ever-present. In college, I traversed it several times every day on a massive pedestrian bridge. I have visited Lake Itasca and waded in the headwaters where the Mississippi begins, and I have been to New Orleans to watch the river on its final turnings before it sloughs into its delta and merges with the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t live near the river now, but I can feel how it has shaped me. Art can be like that, too–it can put you in your place. And if you listen intently to the wild, pulsating flux of Cicatrizes Do Futuro, maybe it can put you in someone else’s place.
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