Arto Lindsay
Biography
After his tenure as guitarist in the great no wave band DNA and punk-jazzers the Lounge Lizards, Arto Lindsay formed the equally exciting and (pun intended) ambitious Ambitious Lovers, while also being involved with the earliest incarnations of the Golden Palominos. Lindsay, a native of Brazil, began conflating the Brazilian pop music of his youth with the sonic density and avant-garde urgings he pursued as a member of the Lower East Side noise rock scene. As a result, his recordings as leader of the Ambitious Lovers are not all atonal skronk, but rather a deft blend of dance-pop and sonic adventurousness. With inestimable help from keyboardist and Ambitious Lover co-conspirator Peter Scherer, the first Ambitious Lovers release, Envy, retains more of a dissonant edge, and as such doesn't seem too far removed from Lindsay's days with DNA. The next record, Greed (noticing a pattern developing here?), was a slick, ebullient pop record that sounded like a direct descendent of the Brazilian pop recorded by giants such as Jorge Ben, Caetano Veloso, and Gilberto Gil. With plenty of up-tempo, danceable tracks, the noisy undercurrent was downplayed perhaps a bit more than noisemeisters would like, but the resulting album was nearly flawless.
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