During the hot Brazilian summer of 1971, Marcos and Paulo Sergio Valle, along with their significant others and six additional couples, rented a few modest fisherman shacks in the small village of Búzios to escape from Rio's more populated beaches. The focus was making music and soul searching, as was the practice for affluent young hippies back then. They stayed for two months. "I wanted to go in a new direction," says Marcos looking back. "I wanted to try out a rock influence and to risk a little bit more." Shifting away from the studio musicians used on 1971's Garra, Vento Sul (translation "South Wind") was a rewarding collaboration with Brazilian progressive rockers O Terço. Originally released in 1972, Vento Sul not only channeled the Búzios beach bum vibe, but also manifested a floating dream like psychedelic sound. Any way you spin it, we at Light In The Attic are extremely proud to present Vento Sul as part of our four-album Marcos Valle reissue campaign. Consisting of an ambitious string of early 1970s landmark studio sessions (sympathetic in spirit to Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye's game changing work from the same era) and released on LP, Vento Sul features extensive liner notes by San Francisco-based writer Allen Thayer (Wax Poetics) with exclusive interview content and song-by-song breakdown from Marcos himself. Fans new and old will finally have easy breezy access to these once hard-to-find Brazilian classics. Elevated by a strong union between Valle and O Terço, Vento Sul'smagical spell of an album is a welcome addition to any South American friendly record collection and sits proudly with the best of Brazil. File after Os Mutantes and before Caetano Veloso.

Für heutige Ohren fällt diese exotische Mischung aus Flöten, E-Gitarren, Gainsbourg-Bass und entrückten Satzgesängen, die ebenso viele Kanten wie schwungvolle Rundungen aufweist, eigentümlich unvermittelt aus Zeit und Raum.

(stereoplay, März 2013)

When Marcos Valle recorded 1972's Vento Sul, he'd been a wildly successful, well-established songwriter, producer, and recording artist for nearly a decade, furthering the horizons of bossa nova and samba in the pre-MPB era. Due to that success, each successive recording brought higher expectations. In the face of mounting pressure, Valle dropped out for a bit, took a vacation, and in the process wrote the music for the album that was to become his hardest left turn to that point. Nothing could have prepared listeners for what transpired on Vento Sul (translation: South Wind). Even after the revolution tropicalia had wrought, this album was radical. The set was composed by Valle and brother Paulo Sérgio Valle in Buzios, then a mellow, out-of-the-way beach town that offered young people great surfing and a cosmic communal hippie vibe provided by the Valles and 14 companions who had taken the two-month summer retreat with them. When Valle returned to Rio, he sought to re-create the laid-back dreamy collaborative atmosphere of Buzios in the studio. He'd been backed live by Brazilian psychedelic, proto-prog rockers O Terço (translation: The Rosary), who included drummer and future guitar hero Vinicius Cantuária. He also employed arrangers Ian Guest and Hugo Bellard and studio aces such as guitarist Claudio Guimarães, drummer Robertinho Silva, and flutist Paulo Guimarães. Some of the music here retains undeniable elements of both bossa and samba ("Malena," "Rosto Barbado," and even the tripped-out "Paisagem de Mariana"), but they are wrapped in expansive psychedelic rock and baroque pop textures. Art rock makes its presence known in opener "Revolução Orgânica," with its contrasting hyper flute and hard rock guitar -- but make no mistake, this is not tropicalia; if anything it reflects the influence of O Terço most, and here too, samba makes its voice known in the bridge. There are Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys sounds, textures, and harmonies throughout, but best heard on cuts such as "Mi Hermoza" (even with its mean electric guitar breaks) and the instrumental "Bôdas de Sangu." "Democústico" is a hallucinatory, political, spoken word number, with phased wah-wah guitars, flutes, harpsichord, and Latin percussion. The title track, by contrast, with its layered piano, guitars, and stretched-to-the-breaking-point waltz rhythm, is so dreamy, spacious, romantic, and sparse, it's the set masterpiece. Vento Sul was greeted with hostility by Valle fans and critics alike, but time has proven that criticism unfounded. It remains one of Valle's most provocative albums, but it's also one of his most beautiful, mysterious, and enduring ones.

(by Thom Jurek, All Music Guide)