Damião Experiença
Damião Ferreira da Cruz (born 27 Sep 1935; died 10 Dec 2016) was a Brazilian artist who performed under several variations of the name Damião Experiença from the 1970s until his death in 2016. According to legend, Damião was born in Santo Amaro de Ipitanga, Bahia (modern-day Lauro de Freitas) to neglectful parents. Damião ran away from home at 14 to Rio de Janeiro, where he soon joined the Brazilian Navy as a radar operator. During his time with the Navy, he sustained an injury, leading him to retire from his position in 1963. Damião received a pension from the Navy and began to produce and distribute his own music in the early 1970s. Some critics have described Damião as the "Brazilian Zappa".
Damião recorded over 25 albums in his nearly 50 year career, some of which have likely never been documented independently. Notoriously, he averted from dating any of his albums (though a few slipped through the cracks over the years). In an attempt to accurately document his discography, fans from the Damião-endorsed Portão do Damião fansite have divided Damião's discography into five phases, each of which is characterized by different instrumentations and playing styles (but not strictly by timespan). On his Planeta Lamma imprint, Damião eventually began to place catalog numbers on his albums, being one of the only official determiners of time on his releases. Only Planeta Lamma and 4C/1308 are known to have dedicated album covers; the rest were given out with random covers (24 of these random covers are documented).
Phase 1: Acoustic Damião with 1 to 5 string(s) guitar, [?], vocals, and harmonica. The lyrics are almost all sung in the Planeta Lamma dialect.
Phase 2: Acoustic Damião with normal (6-sting) guitar, marimba, harmonica, and bongos. Lyrics are sung in the Planeta Lamma dialect with hints of Portuguese and Spanish.
Phase 3: Damião Experiença layers four or five previously recorded acoustic [?] from the 70s. The result is a polyphonic chaos, [with] five [?] at the same time. Typically[,] at the beginning and [...] end of the discs, shorts clips of previously recorded tracks are inserted and [?], literally [?]. The language used is the Planeta Lamma dialect over 5 daminhões and [some form of] Portuguese.
Phase 4: Damião sings with the band [called] Planeta Lamma[] in Portuguese [with] previously written lyrics. [?] exists a song sung in the Planeta Lamma dialect, but based on the style of [Frank] Zappa.
Phase 5: Damião sings with the band [called] Planeta Lamma in Portuguese [with] previously written lyrics and sings "no tempo". Instrmental songs exist at this stage. From this point, [Damião] was known as Brazilian Zappa.
Legend: Releases marked as pre-1995 a.) have no sequential catalog number and b.) were manufactured by the pressing plant Tapecar Gravações S.A., which stopped pressing records in 1995.