Cuidado Madame

When people talk about Arto Lindsay's body of work, they often project a reductive 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. In the sense that there are many kinds of dreams. In 2014, Northern Spy 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).