Test - O Jogo Humano

As their name implies, Test is all about experimentation: their new album, O Jogo Humano , takes inspiration from the marchinhas: a type of music common in Brazil’s street carnival which consists of various songs with non-stop percussion satirizing particular parts of society.

It’s mainly a form thing, though: the songs don’t have a clear beginning or ending. Also, throughout the album there’s never-ending drumming, every now and then accompanied by guitars and vocals. Song titles are also uncommon - mostly words or sentence snippets. One good way is to think of it as Cortázar’s Hopscotch (if Cortázar did blast-beats, which he didn’t; so, Test’s more hectic).

The idea is for the album to work as an interactive game, with the listener joining words (song titles) to form phrases and come up with his/her own version of the songs, which somehow end up sounding like “real”, fully-conceived, tunes. Which is even more impressive considering the band is just a duo (João [G/V] and Barata [D]). Vinyl and cassette versions of the album will have pre-built songs, different for each country/zone they're released into.