For centuries and to this day, (male) poetry about women compares them to flowers,
or at least surrounds them in their objectification raptures. Here is a feminine musical formation which, in its own name, reinforcing the assumed and intentional circumstance of being made up only of women, in a medium – that of improvised music – which is dominated by men, subverts this botanical factor.
Lantana is called, referring to flowers that spontaneously grow in nature. Weeding, weed, indomitable flowers. The use of herbicides and the introduction of insects to control their spread do not affect them and livestock that feed on them become ill.
For Maria do Mar, Joana Guerra, Helena Espvall, Maria Radich, Anna Piosik and Carla Santana, the music they play doesn´t need to contain more explicit messages (Radich’s voice is an instrument like the others): what they bring as a concept and the project could not be made clearer, by the inherent attitude of nonconformity, rebellion, and contestation in the form of music that doesn’t need to be anything other than organized sound. An organic and rhizomatic song made of wild blossoms that spontaneously burst from the earth, a song that does not submit to stereotypes, that explores, that invades, that contradicts, that destabilizes, including the coordinates of what we recognize as “improvised music”, to such a creative stream that these exclusivist manifestations – “boys things”, one would say – has been going on since the late 1960s.
(Text by Rui Eduardo Paes)
