Alga Marghen returns with an amazing hard turn into the left-field, delivering the first ever reissue of Damião Experiença’s cult, 1971 LP, Planeta Lamma. A definitive gesture of Brazilian countercultural music of its era, with original copies self-released and distributed by the artist by hand, making them highly collectable and rare as hen’s teeth, it’s a singular effort of outsider experimental folk that has absolutely no equivalent before or since.

Over the course of nearly three decades of activity, the Italian imprint, Alga Marghen, has continuously cast light into the shadows of historical sound practice, offering particular focus to underappreciated artefacts at the juncture of visual art, sound-art, experimental music, and sound-poetry. With each subsequent release, the label has helped to reform our understanding of the 20th century, and the voices that made it what it was. Never to be easily predicted as to where their next step will take them, their latest delves into the obscure shadows of the early 70s Latin American underground with the first ever reissue of the Brazilian artist Damião Experiença’s debut LP, Planeta Lamma, originally self-issued in 1971.

Damião Experiença (1935-2016) was a Brazilian singer-songwriter, lyricist, and multi-instrumentalist, who gained a passionate cult following over the course of his life and career, becoming regarded as a major icon of Brazil’s counterculture, as well as one of the country's most famous and prolific outsider musicians. Experiença was an unpretentious eccentric and compulsive hoarder who lived on the margins of society in the bairro of Estácio in Rio de Janeiro. During the early 1970s, he began producing his own LPs - the first of which was “Planeta Lamma” - which he sold in the streets and handed out for free, with many - dozens in number - becoming highly sought after collectors’ items over the course of his decades long career.

Recorded at a small studio inside his apartment, Experiença’s music falls entirely outside of any form of categorization, blending wild experimentation with an entirely freaked out form of folk and psychedelic rock. The songs that make up his debut LP - “Planeta Lamma” - defy logic, encountering the artist often playing multiple instruments at the same time - a one-string guitar, harmonicas, shakers, marimbas, etc. - and singing in a mix of Portuguese and a dialect he created himself - "Planet Lamma dialect" - freely improvising lyrics about a vast number of eccentric themes.

“Planeta Lamma” is, simply put, a wild and raucous affair falling somewhere between the psychedelia of Captain Beefheart, the outsider singer-songwriter efforts of Wesley Willis and Daniel Johnston, and the weirder and wilder ends of Brazilian folk and Tropicália. Truly singular and out on its own, while the album has long held a cult following in and outside of Brazil, Alga Marghen’s beautiful vinyl reissue finally allows access for the broader audience that it’s always deserved.