Brazilians Who Take Their Fun Mixed with a Clatter in NY

And it made sure that noise infiltrated the supple tunes. There were abrupt chirps and swoops from keyboards and sampler, while guitar lines flipped into distortion and reverb or deliberately strayed into dissonance. In one song an insistent keyboard chord kept jabbing against the beat and the harmony; partway through, the rest of the band dropped out to flaunt it. For this band the noise is half the fun.

Actually its three bands, or one cooperative known as the +2s. Alexandre Kassin, Domenico Lancelotti and Moreno Veloso (whose father is the great songwriter Caetano Veloso) have each put out an album backed by the other two musicians; Mr. Kassins Futurismo (Luaka Bop) is the most recent. They are following through on the aesthetics of Caetano Velosos generation, which welcomed modernism and postmodernism by simply tossing the outside worlds intrusions and discontinuities onto the stockpile of raw materials, alongside their entire Brazilian heritage.

I have no fear of the world, Mr. Kassin sang in Tranquilo, over a Cuban lilt. His songs often mingle nonchalance and disquiet, with an easygoing melody or a trim new-wave guitar riff behind lyrics about what might go wrong.