ANAVITÓRIA find the color in their life in new album “Cor”
It’s the middle of the night, Ana Caetano doesn’t know what time exactly, and she is rethinking her decisions. She is full of mixed feelings and regret, she questions whether she made the right choices in a past relationship. The 26-year-old singer-songwriter, one-half of the Brazilian music duo ANAVITORIA alongside 26-year-old singer-songwriter Vitoria Falcão, turned her doubt into track eight titled ‘Ainda é Tempo’ part of the duo’s latest album, “Cor”, released on January 1, 2021.
Upon sharing the song with a friend Caetano realized it felt like a ‘fome de falar’; an insatiable hunger and need to speak. Her friend described the track as a plea, a ravenous desire to simply speak. On brand with the album’s intense desire to be seen and heard, all tracks are accompanied by a visualizer: a music video. For ‘Ainda é tempo’ the duo can be seen recreating Marina Abramovic’s performance ‘Rest Energy’. The performance observes Abramovic and former partner German conceptual artist, Ulay, as they hold opposite ends of an arrow, with the arrow pointed directly at Abramovic’s heart, creating a tension and sense of trust.
“The visualizers don’t have much conscious connection of the visual material with the lyrics of the songs, we didn’t think that way, we had a lot of ideas and we kind of distributed them all,” explains Caetano. “But everything narrates something, from the moment we put this performance [Rest of Life] in this clip, people started to have several interpretations but there is no connection between our choices for each video and the stories of the songs. I think that’s the coolest part of all, we opened it up to a million interpretations.”
The album “Cor”, mostly written pre-pandemic, translates to color from the duo’s native language, Portuguese. Despite ANAVITORIA’s undeniable international success with their EuroTour in 2020 performing in France, Ireland, Spain and the UK, their newest album is unapologetically Brazilian. As the duo stands together in a yellow, blue and white sweater on the cover of their album they create a cover that represents the flag of their state of origin in Brazil, Tocantins. The song “Amarelo, azul e branco” is accompanied by a visualizer with the two in the same environment and outfit as the cover.
“This video is so beautiful because it looks like the cover and that transports me to the entire record,” says Falcão. “I think the colors are talking to the entire universe of the record and that is so strong for us to talk about, the place we came from; our land.” The duo originally met in Aguaraina, Tocantins while still in school. It wasn’t until 2013 when they reunited, now in college, during a party in Rio de Janeiro, as can be seen in their autobiographical Netflix original film “Ana e Vitoria” released in 2018.
ANAVITORIA’s well known black and white wardrobe adopted by the two since the beginning of their career is now left behind for vibrant new tones. “The beginning of the black and white phase was very genuine,” explains Falcão. “In my wardrobe I had a lot of black stuff and Ana had a lot of white stuff so it made a lot of sense.”
“We didn’t have an understanding of what we really wanted and what matched us,” expands Caetano. “[The beginning of a career] is a moment of building one’s own personality so there are a lot of internal conflicts and we’ve gone through a lot of turbulent times. We’ve been disappointed in a lot of people and then I feel like this hurricane of things prepared us for what’s coming now. And now it’s a calmer and a lighter place.”
On December 14 of 2019 Caetano pulled out her notepad in a bus station between Petrolina and Juazeiro do Norte in Brazil and wrote down “Cor”, a word that had popped in her head. She then wrote it on her notepad, thinking if she wrote it down it would become a real project. She then shared the idea with Falcão and the two jumped on a journey to understand why the word made so much sense to them. They started with numbers; “Cor” has three letters, this was their third official studio album and in spirituality the number three is considered the union between body, mind and spirit. Their meaning was found in a mix of “numerology, spirituality and pure genuine intuition” read Caetano’s instagram post on December 21, 2020, the night before the album was released.
After a long journey in the search for the essence and sound of their third studio album the duo achieved their goal. “Cor” is loud and unapologetically honest with instruments that mix traditional Brazilian music styles like MPB, bossa nova and jazz.
“We found what we were looking for,” Caetano reflects. “I think that since we started going on the road and doing shows it was an attempt at that, but we still hadn’t arrived in this place, our knowledge and our possibilities didn’t allow it. I feel that now in this album we had time to really look for it, we experimented a lot, gave up ideas. Finally the whole process allowed us to build this interesting layer of sound and not that the search ends here because from the moment we deliver the body, we start with other longings and so I think it will always be like that.”
Due to the pandemic the songs from “Cor” haven’t seen the stage yet. The duo’s process is heavily influenced by how their fans receive the songs in person, the energy that a concert creates and how it gives new meaning to songs. Falcão cannot picture their next album yet, not until they are able to fully explore “Cor”, performing it live around the country and possibly internationally. For now the duo has a small tour planned for summer 2022 around Brazil.
“I will only truly know if we found our sound when we get to perform these songs on stage,” explains Falcão. “There’s a feeling when we make a record, especially after the journey we’ve lived on stage we always find a need for other songs and we’ll think ‘right, I want to sing that, let’s talk about it, I think there should be a song like that.’ We look for a lot of moments from the show and I think this album is something we’ve been trying to do for a while because we already had some needs that we didn’t get in other albums, but in the end you end up doing what you were ready to do at that time and time. “Cor” comes after all these years on the road and I think we knew more about what we wanted.”
