Grab It While You Can: Limited Edition Reissue of Nuno Canavarro and Carlos Maria Trindade’s ‘Mr. Wollogallu’

“Let’s say that this was already inside us, but we were busy doing pop,” Portuguese musician Carlos Maria Trindade said of making Mr. Wollogallu, his brilliant 1991 collaborative album with the elusive Portuguese electro-acoustic composer Nuno Canavarro. “It was pop that allowed us to be professionals and living on music, through music, not having to do other jobs,” he told Red Bull Music Academy’s Lauren Martin, adding, “At the time we couldn’t live on this kind of music.”

In the 1980s, Trindade had gotten his start in pop rock bands Corpo Diplomático and Heróis do Mar; for his part, Canavarro played in Street Kids and Delfins but had started experimenting with samplers. In 1988, Canavarro issued the experimental electronic private press album Plux Quba, now considered an ambient-ish classic after Drag City sub label Moikai reissued it in the 1990s.

The two met through a mutual friend and first made music together when they shared a concert bill. Not long after, they entered the studio together, according to release notes.

“The conception and recording of Mr. Wollogallu took quiet a long time,” say the release notes that accompany the second vinyl repress (limited to 750 copies worldwide) since 2018 from the Barcelona label Urpa I Musell. “Both luminaries would convene in a home studio during the first half of 1990, brainstorming together with calm, care, and love.”

They divided the record into halves — “My side and Nuno’s side,” Trindade recalled to Red Bull Music Academy, “but we interacted in the arrangements, so it’s interesting methods.” He described the experience as “an example of coming away from the pop world and closing yourself in a room for six months and doing this, without listening to any music. Just two musicians, two computers, a mixer, a Dolby system, a few outboards, synthesizers and samplers and your imagination. And that’s it.”

Nearly 35 years after it came out, what they crafted remains a breathtaking document, one driven by deep, resonant synth-tones, curious spoken-word samples, playfulness, and melodicism. Think Boards of Canada minus the muffled beats and pastoral vibes. Side A is overseen by Trindade, Side B by Canavarro, and although they worked together on the whole thing, it’s not hard to see the contrasting approaches. Trindade’s work is more melodic and joyful, and less weird and unsettling, than Canavarro’s oft eerie approach.

Those who know Plux Quba — and those who don’t should make a date to spend deep, quality time with it — will hear in Canavarro’s tracks echoes of his quiet work on that album, but augmented by Trindade’s accoutrements. “Blue Terra” is a luxurious 7-minute track that opens with a field-recording of woman’s voice in song, before moving into a mesmerizing rhythm-and-synth-melody combination textured with faraway, haunting voice samples that drop in and out likes ghost howls in a humid cavern.

“We were assembling from radio, from TV, from video,” said Trindade. “We were sampling from records, because samplers were machines that had just come out. [M]y sampler could sample 13 seconds, which was magic. But nowadays it’s ridiculous, because in computers you can sample 10 hours, if you want, of sound. So we had to make big gymnastics to put the samples. With the time we had, we had to be really economical to make the samplings … Sampling was a recording process that gave a lot of power to the musician, because all of a sudden, you not only had the sounds inside the modules and the synthesizers, but you could put sounds from the outside into the synthesizers and mix it. And this record is a bit of those experimentations we made.”

A killer record that will wow the masses in your next set or listening session, that the label Urpa I Musell only pressed 750 copies of Mr. Wollogallu is a little baffling; this edition with vanish quicker than you know.

We’ve got a few in the shop. If interested, grab a copy here.