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Arto Lindsay

Arto Lindsay has built a career around collision: abrasive guitar against supple rhythm, experimental instincts against pop structure, and American no wave against the Brazilian music he absorbed while growing up. Born in Richmond on May 28, 1953, Lindsay spent his early years in Brazil, where his parents were Christian missionaries in Pernambuco. He speaks fluent Brazilian Portuguese and returned to the United States in the mid-1970s to attend college. By the end of that decade, Lindsay had helped form DNA with Ikue Mori and Robin Crutchfield, who was soon replaced by Pere Ubu’s Tim Wright. The band appeared on the Brian Eno-produced 1978 sampler No New York, a defining document of the no wave scene. Lindsay’s unschooled, deliberately unconventional guitar style subsequently found a place across the downtown music world. In the early 1980s, he performed on early albums by The Lounge Lizards and The Golden Palominos, while his wider circle included John Lurie, Anton Fier, John Zorn and Kip Hanrahan. That appetite for unlikely combinations continued with Ambitious Lovers, the group Lindsay formed with keyboardist Peter Scherer after The Lounge Lizards. Drawing on pop, samba and bossa nova, the project was less interested in smoothing its influences together than in letting their contrasts create something new. Lindsay described the idea as “Al Green and samba,” with loud and soft held in deliberate juxtaposition. The group’s albums included Envy, Greed and Lust. Lindsay’s work extends across guitar, singing, composition, songwriting, record production, recording and conceptual art. Bassist Melvin Gibbs, whom Lindsay met in 1979 and first worked with in 1984, became a recurring musical partner; Lindsay has called him his closest collaborator. Across these different roles, Lindsay’s career is tied together by an enduring interest in friction, surprise and the possibilities that emerge when musical languages are placed side by side.