ABSTRACT
Rene Perez Joglar has explored transnational musical genetics by making music based on his own genome. Since his DNA, like that of many people in the Americas, and especially in Afro-indigeno-Latin America, traces back to Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and indigenous America, back in short to a proto-transnational genome that preceded even the formation of nation-states, Joglar decided to collaborate with musicians with whom he shares DNA. In his 1974 novel Concierto Barroco, Franco-Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier gave a foretaste of the convergences of musical worlds by deploying the prose resources of the novel to evoke a miscegenated utopia of classical and popular musics. A striking feature of Brazilian popular music is its outlandish poetic and literary ambition. The first music video from the Multi-Viral album is “Somos Anormales,” which features a carnivalesque celebration of the grotesque and deformed as part of a cornucopia of imagistic variations on birth and human life.
