While writing an article on early music performers in Brazil recently, I interviewed two members of Grupo ANIMA, a wonderful band in Campinas, Sao Paulo. The musicians sent me their three recordings to date. I haven't found the CDs for sale anywhere in the States, or I'd tell you where to get them.

In describing ANIMA's sound, I keep wanting to use the word "tribal" -- which fits the band's own search for a kind of mythologized, primal human past in the European repertoire. ANIMA isn't interested in the standard early music endeavor of performing old repertoire "as it was done at the time," but in, the band's fiddle player Luiz Fiaminghi told me, "the possibility of reinventing the past."

The group takes medieval and renaissance tunes to be fragments of a lost oral/memorial culture, musical traces of a pre-modern experience that library research can't reveal. The musicians use Brazilian folk music as the oral tradition in which to bring these old melodies back to life. It's not far-fetched if you consider how the Brazilian tradition absorbed and preserved the Portuguese colonists' musical influence in the fifteenth century. ANIMA began to take shape when recorder player Valeria Bittar returned from years of early music study in Europe and sought "an intimacy" with the old music of her own country. She found it: “music that was not notated, ancient music that is still alive in contemporary Brazilian ‘traditional’ societies of unlettered communities, far from mechanical thinking and industrialization, where a chronological time line does not exist.” In some of their publicity, ANIMA refers to such places as “islands of medievality.”

Fiaminghi plays -- and of course this is very exciting to me -- the off-shoulder Brazilian traditional fiddle, whose shape preserves the encounter of the local crafts tradition with the violin. ANIMA's crossover project goes both ways, with the recorder and harpsichord joining in with indigenous percussion instruments on Brazilian tunes. It's all just music. I wish I could go to Brazil and play with these people.

ANIMA's music-making expresses what I think is a secret longing of many lovers of early music: a nostalgia for the unknown pre-modern world, for a more raw, direct, magical experience. This is not a very academic longing -- which makes it even cooler that the members of ANIMA spend a good bit of energy in theorizing what they do, looking for influences in everything from cultural criticism to contemporary theater. Bittar and Fiaminghi are both working on doctorate degrees, but the band's music-making is fleshy, direct, and invigorating.

Grupo ANIMA can be seen on YouTube (http://youtube.com/). Their website's English version isn't operational yet, but it's worth trolling through the Portuguese pages if only for the luscious close-ups of the band's instruments: http://www.animamusica.art.br/#.

If anyone knows where to get ANIMA's recordings, let me know and I'll add that information here.