By Brandon Bussolini

Brazilian Girls just released an album named for a city that they’ll be leaving for a little bit. They used to tour a lot, but now vocalist Sabina Sciubba, keyboard player Didi Gutman, and drummer Aaron Johnston are leaving New York City to spend time elsewhere. This makes sense since Brazilian Girls’ music has no single place of origin or definite direction. Their new album, like its predecessors, sits across several different styles and changes from minute to minute.

It can be a fun game to chase down the kinds of music Brazilian Girls incorporate into their own, but the sound itself has very little to do with tradition or context - it’s synthetic, and at its best is good enough to stop you from wondering whether what you’re listening to is world music or not - and whether there’s even anything wrong with that.

Sciubba’s voice is the band’s most distinctive element, but the songs themselves are little intelligent machines, and they work unhurriedly and with economy. The new full-length's first song, “St. Petersburg,” is where this clicks into place immediately, with its samba-techno rhythm and big triumphant chorus, where Sciubba’s typically arch delivery breaks with sophistication and becomes uncomplicatedly raw and moving. I had the opportunity to speak with Sciubba as the group began a short tour supporting New York City (Verve Forecast). Brazilian Girls play Mezzanine Saturday, Sept. 27.

SFBG: I read that after completing the album you took off for Paris. Was this a vacation, or something more permanent?

Sabina Sciubba: I mean, now I’m in Los Angeles because we’re doing a little tour, but Paris will be my home for the short future. We had an apt in the onzième arrondissement and now we’re going to be moving to a different one in the north of Paris, near Montmartre.

SFBG: Most band bios mention that you grew up in Italy, Germany, and France, but how long did you spend in each country?

SS: I was born in Rome, and lived my childhood and school years essentially until I was 18 in Bavaria, outside of Munich, and then I lived in Nice for five years, and then I came to New York.

SFBG: As far as the new album in concerned, I understand that the band allowed themselves more time to work on songs than on the previous albums, and I've read that the band writes their songs partly in live performances. How did that decision affect the album's final shape, and what did you find yourselves doing differently?

SS: The idea that our songs come from jamming is maybe an exaggeration of something that is partially true. When we first started as a band there were elements we used in those so-called jam sessions, which were sort of the rough beginnings of songs. Then we came up with ideas in live situations, which was mainly playing in Nublu which was this village bar where we had a kind of residency for the first year. So it’s not like we were jamming completely.

It's true that there were always some elements that we brought into it, I suppose, and that remained our way of composing throughout the three records - that's pretty much how we functioned. I think this last time we just put in a little more time really finding out the ideas, and even if an idea didn’t seem to work at first, we would just keep hammering at it whereas before we maybe just abandoned it in favor of something more immediate.

SFBG: That makes sense - I'm thinking of a review of Talk to la Bomb that describes your sound as "inorganic." That's how I hear your music, and thinking of "St. Petersburg" from the new album in particular, it doesn't have the thump of techno, and doesn't have much to do with rock or world music, and those ideas of authenticity. But there's a sense of getting inspiration from that music, and folding it into something else.

SS: You know, it remains true that there’s a very spontaneous element in the writing, I suppose there always is. Say, for example, the way ["St. Petersburg"] came up originally, the melody and the very basic elements of it came up spontaneously - like some of the sounds that Didi’s playing and the melody and the lyrics - but then we worked on it, we would overdub and try another section or add another instrument. In that sense I think you’re right that it’s inorganic.

SFBG: Another song on the album, "L'interprete," struck me as something that wouldn't have shown up on the previous albums. It's very quiet and spare, just voice and guitar, and there's a kind of Vashti Bunyan feeling to it, where Brazilian Girls songs in general tend to be almost brash.

SS: The only song I would compare that to is "Ships in the Night," which is the last track on the first record, and which was a very contemplative ballad and melancholy but it still was somewhat closer to the rest of the album. "Interprete" is a very vulnerable-sounding ballad. It's sort of a crux, or the album's manifestation of the change in direction we’re heading towards, I think. Do you understand the lyrics?

SFBG: I think I've been too into the melody to figure them out yet.

SS: The lyrics are something like, “You say yes with the eyes but no with the mouth, you laugh and then it’s up to me to interpret what you mean.” It’s all about the face’s conflicting messages or ambiguous body language. So it’s not really sad but it’s very vulnerable.

SFBG: On the subject of faces, a lot of the articles I've read about the band have focused on how you would cover your eyes - with your hair or fabric or whatever - during live performances, so you could see the audience and they could not see you. Have you stopped doing that now?

SS: Yeah, I’ve stopped doing it with this record for a reason that's not really conceptual, but just the fact that I got tired of doing it. Because I was doing it when we were touring and then after a while it started feeling like a schitck, like a pony trick. It didn’t feel authentic, where at first it was very authentic and it just felt right. Suddenly it didn’t anymore.

SFBG: I also saw it as a political gesture, an attempt to maintain anonymity when privacy and anonymity are very difficult to maintain, whether it's social networking sites or wiretapping.

SS: In a way, that was something that I had said before as far as covering the eyes was concerned because it was about not wanting to see what was happening.

Now I’m actually more curious than I’ve been in a long time about what’s going to happen. If one wanted there could even be another interpretation of taking off the eyeband as revealing that curiosity. And the thought is scary but at the same time very fascinating because so many things could happen.

I’m very curious and I don’t think I’ve ever been that curious about this future, or whatever you want to call politics.

SFBG: It also seems appropriate, given the Brazilian Girls don't really seem to have a target demographic. Your style doesn't fit into any available niche.

SS: Not at all in fact, yeah. It’s very noticeable at our shows. I like to see our records as a sort of going with the flow on our end, and I do think I’ll always see them like that. There was very little constraint and artifice in our making the records, and I think that they are really snapshots of our lives at that time lyrically, musically, and energy-wise.

SFBG: I find it interesting that, given your tendency to write lyrics that seem designed to be open to as many interpretations as possible, you named the album something that the listener can really put anything into. It also seems like it invites the listeners to ask what NYC you're talking about.

SS: Ironically, the title of the album is quite the contrary of what you mentioned. We had decided we wanted to take a break from touring, which we had been doing for a couple of years very intensely, and in a way making the album was the first time we spent time in NYC again.

We had all these memories and notes and ideas that we had from touring - that’s why there’s all these names of cities. We took our luggage back home from the tour, and we opened it and looked into it, and then while we were enjoying being in NYC again, we wrote the songs with these memories and souvenirs we had brought from the road.

SFBG: It seems like your current tour is shorter than usual.

SS: We’re doing this tour from now till mid-October, and then we will stop touring for about a year because I’m pregnant. That’s actually why our touring schedule has changed drastically - we're doing a short run and then we will have to take about a year-long break.

SFBG: Congratulations! I guess that also means you won't be playing much at Nublu. In "Internacional," you namedropped the venue, putting it on the same level as the cities and countries you listed.

SS: Nublu right now doesn’t play that role it used to for us because I haven’t been there in a while, but a lot of the people that became our friends we met at Nublu. For example, I ran into a very good friend of mine from Rome at Nublu.

But it remains a presence in the lyrics of "Internacional" and that's because it’s sort of a backwards list of the places that I have been, starting from the moment that I was writing them down. They're also important stations - sometimes I haven’t been there but they stand for something that happened to me that I related to - soI suppose Nublu really deserved a place as a city because it's played a big role in our life.

SFBG: Preparing for the interview, I did a Google image search for your name, and one of the first images that came up was of your wearing an Obama T-shirt. What's it like for you as a band to be touring in the run-up to the election?

SS: I hate not being here for the elections because I'm very confident Obama's going to win. As my boyfriend said it's not a question of whether he's going to be the president, he already is. In his behavior he's already the winner, already victorious.

Honestly after all the heaviness, the darkness and disillusion of the terrifying Bush administration, the other administrations over the planet that were very similar but didn't get as many bad reviews, I think that the moment that will be lifted it will be a tremendous moment of relief.

I wish i could be here because I spent the last eight years here, and I lived the unhappiness, and I wish I could also live the relief, but I can't since I'm going to have to be in France in November.

SFBG: That's a good note to conclude on, but since we're talking about politics, I also wanted to mention that one of the most interesting qualities of your music is that it's political, but without necessarily having any explicit political content. It's not about politics, but embodies a kind of cosmopolitain worldview that's not detached from emotion. I'm thinking about the way that you switch between languages based on the feel of the word or phrase, not because the choice means something in itself.

SS: It's really obvious that our music and the fact that I switch languages and stuff is sometimes an obstacle to us selling a lot of records because some people consider it pretentious or inaccessible, but it's very authentic. It's not because I want to show that I can = it's just as emotion dictates. It happens very naturally.

I really do think that openness to the kind of music we play is something that's going to increase in the next decade, years, or whatever because everything's getting more cosmopolitan. That's what "Nouveau Americain" is about.

BRAZILIAN GIRLS
Sat/27, 8 p.m., $25
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
(415) 820-9669