Album Release by Jacques Denis “It’s a sound that comes from afar, one of a young woman whose current musings find their roots in her history. Gabriela Riley was born and raised in a rural communal setting in Vermont in the northeast of the United States, preserved from the acceleration brought about by the current of grand planetary networks. “Growing up far away from high-speed Internet and all the types of major media, I’ve always perceived as having been an advantage. The forest permits development of vast imagination,” she shares. If nature, in its exalted silence exists as a source of inspiration and “creative serenity”, the young woman affirms this singularly multiple universe that harkens back to her early years and also to this quite colorful soundtrack. She does so without forcing her voice, transmitted through a New Zealander father and Brazilian mother, both amateurs of music in the plurality of their musical suggestions to her in youth: from Neil Young to James Brown, from the Clash to Jorge Ben. Of all the ways to write a song, she navigates through the voice of herself, who in adolescence, tapped into the radios’ good vibrations, listening to folk and soul classics, not delaying in her discovery of Hip Hop, without questioning opposition of said genres (Folk and Hip Hop), so often separated a priori. “Folk, like Hip Hop, is built upon narration. Both use music as an avenue upon which to have fun, but also one of thought. The two genres dabble in wordplay, slang of the times, and incorporate social commentary in an explicit or more subliminal manner through their lyrics.” In the times of the 2.0 world, the young woman fits perfectly into this groove, one where the words she sings should be understood on varying levels: at first encounter, her songs may be experienced as hymns of love, lost or sublime, but they reveal hidden meaning to those who lend their ears to other senses. “Love must be understood as a lesson in spirituality, a way in which to comprehend the world around us. In what I write, there’s an essence of nostalgia for all the experiences I’ve had the chance to live and have yet to live”. Like her greatest references – Sam Cooke, Lauryn Hill, David Bowie, or also Curtis Mayfield, in terms of music – like the major authors she admires – J.R.R. Tolkien, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison or also Jorge Amado, to name only a few – Gabriela Riley invites us to read between her lines, amongst the folds of an essential memory through which the urgencies of current happenings can be understood. After initiating her career in New York and LA, notably with the group High Desert Fires lead by Chris Traynor, she continues to be a member, Gabriela Riley moved to Rio de Janeiro in late 2012, a city she frequented throughout her youth. “In moving here, I felt free of weight of the past. I was in a new place that did not know me, but that I knew, a place where I had less access to habitual cultural references.” Faithful to this duality, among assumed references and necessary extensions beyond them, the singer is able to refine her voice in writing that resembles her well. It is one that traces the contours of this record in the form of self-portraiture. “Living and working with music in Brazil truly changed things, notably because I found myself in a musical environment of collectivity I often long for,” she comments. If the young woman continues to follow her method of songwriting- “I always start with the music, then let words come to me, that I then fit into a melody that is an agreement with the emotions that have also emerged, thus forming lyrical skeleton to work within”- she will learn alongside experts in her field. “The musicians, sound engineers, and producers in Rio have given me a lot of space to express my personality, but they are equally the first to critique me, positively, by sharing their knowledge and experience.” It’s worth noting among all of them, the resounding poet from São Paulo, Arnaldo Antunes, who invited her to work on his recent album “Já É”. This contact sharpened her quill and refined her prosody. Another determinant encounter has been with drummer Stéphane San Juan, who would become her producer, “I met Stéphane by chance one day in a studio in Santa Teresa.” “Is that you singing?” we his first words to her, “Cool voice” followed. He provided her a musical buttress via Os Ritmistas, one of the groups to which this French drummer, so well versed in Samba, belongs. “His support in music has been fundamental. He gave me his vote of confidence and offered me his extensive experience. I consider him to be my Yoda, a guide, a confidant, always open to transmit all he has learned travelling through the world of music.” He granted the benefit of a premier cast for her forthcoming record: Guilherme Monteiro, guitarist and composer, like an alter ego who with she co-wrote two songs, the bassist Alberto Continentino, who she likes to call “Soul Man Continentino”, is one of her funkiest partners and the mind behind of most of the horn arrangements; Kassin, a “Master Mind”, who allowed for the riddance of superfluous fluff, the organist, Marcelo Jeneci, who ads a touch of his psyche; Sean O’Hagan, of the High Llamas, who signs off on two sublime arrangements “adding an additional layer of melancholy”. No doubt this record is the fruit of recording sessions among family. .” In Rio she found something better than refuge, but the basis of a new start with this odd crew of post-hippies. The horn section, (Altair Martins, Marlon Sette, and Zé Carlos Bigorna) breathes fresh air, an energy, a subtle wind of freedom from her songs that in their apparent sweetness often reveal a necessary hint of grief. All the influences that make up the personality of her authorship are entitled to: Hip Hop and MPB, folk and R&B, Jazz, and so on... It’s unnecessary to restrict this self-portrait of a woman of this world, in all her diversity, to a classification. At the end of the day, this collection sounds and resonates like a reflection, written in the present of her subjective but nourished by the alterity that we henceforth name creolization. More than just a simple Photo on an ID card, the idea is to read into a vision of the world she projects herself within, a diapason of the vibrations of this folk singer, in all significance of the term, that cannot, and does not want to, limit her expression with walls of thought that are fixed. “I have been blessed with the chance to have access to a number of different worlds that exist on this one earth, it is from these universes that I’ve woven my own. I’ve learned through all these encounters that most humans are inhabited by the same existential questions relating to emotion, love, loss, survival, exclusions, and how we then live these out." - Jacques Denis