MONCHMONCH eats on his new single, “Vampira”
MONCHMONCH takes another bite with the video for “Vampira,” his seconds single from the new album GUARDILHA ESPANCA TATO, out now via Seloki records. The Brazilian singer’s name is an onomatopoetic reference to his digestive approach, chewing up punk rock alongside Brazilian influences and experimental sounds. “Vampira” takes the theme a step further, placing the German expressionist aesthetic inside the belly of poet Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagist Manifesto, a radical modernist text urging Brazilian artists to consume and digest the culture of their European colonizers as a means of liberation.
The video for “Vampira” brings the Vampiric mythos back to the chiaroscuro roots of Nosferatu, playing with the contrast between light and shadow, as MONCHMONCH crawls through an abandoned room, drawn to the beams of light yet desperate to avoid them. This first half of the track features some of the sparsest instrumentation on the album, building tension through absence, vamping on a single chord until the scene shifts and MONCHMONCH is on stage, suddenly performing.
This shift is accompanied by the sweet release of a chord change, signaling the start of a musical climax whose fulfillment is also the ultimate release of Death. In the post-mortem instrumental break, the band gathers round and ceremonially covers MONCHMONCH with dirt, but the final shot is of his open eyes, signifying the inevitable transformative return.
The question “Vampira” poses is this: who is the vampire, the ‘you’ that MONCHMONCH sings to? Is it a lover? A listener? An entire society? A global financial system designed to extract the very lifeblood of both artist and audience? Perhaps it is all these things, and more. Central to myth of the vampire is the transmissibility of the condition as a means of perpetuation, the way in which the victim is also filled with the thirst, and rises in undeath, ever compelled to take the next bite. We consume and are consumed by all of it, always, living partly in the shadows, and partly in the light.
