From Wikipedia (edited)
:
Damião Ferreira da Cruz (1935?-2016), better known by his stage name Damião Experiença,was a Brazilian singer-songwriter, lyricist, multi-instrumentalist, record producer and compulsive hoarder. Considered to be a major name of the Brazilian countercultural scene and one of the country's most famous and prolific outsider musicians, he was praised [and] constantly compared to schizophrenic outsider artist Arthur Bispo do Rosário and musicians Frank Zappa, Moondog, Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra, Jandek and Father Yod. His albums, usually sold by him in the streets or even handed out for free when he felt like it, became much-sought collector's items, and his reclusive, eccentric and unpretentious personality has attained him a passionate cult following.
He experienced an unhappy childhood and was constantly mistreated by his parents, which led him to run away from home to Rio de Janeiro when he was between 10 and 13 years old. As a youth he served as a radar operator for the Brazilian Navy; while in the Navy he allegedly fell off a ship's crow's nest, hitting his head on the floor, which could have provoked his erratic mental state.
After his precocious retirement from the Navy in 1963, he went on to live with a prostitute in a stilt house in the vicinity of the bairro of Estácio, became a pimp and was able to produce his records thanks to money obtained via procuring
Damião's musical style is impossible to categorize accurately, since he experiments with numerous genres, more prominently freak folk, psychedelic rock, reggae and experimental rock. His songs have no logical sense at first sight, and mostly of them are sung in a dialect created by him, the "Planet Lamma dialect" (spoken in his eponymous "home planet"), with improvised lyrics.
He usually plays different instruments and sings at the same time. In his earlier releases, Damião used exclusively guitars with different numbers of strings (e.g., his debut Planeta Lamma was played with an one-string guitar), harmonicas, shakers and occasionally marimbas, mixing Portuguese with his own dialect in his lyrics.
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