Victor Negri’s ‘Sem’ Builds a Language from What Remains

After over a decade releasing music as Arubu Avua, Victor Negri strips the project down to his own name—and to something stylistically bare. Sem, Portuguese for “without,” emerged from a period of grief, relocation, and prolonged uncertainty. Recordings made across years and continents are gathered here, shaped by irregular guitar loops, field recordings, feedback, and electronics. The result is an album less concerned with loss itself than with the slow, imperfect work of reassembly.

Negri has cited almost exclusive listening to Loren Connors and Stars of the Lid during the record’s making, and their influence is felt in the music’s patient, decaying surfaces. Tracks like “Voçoroca,” “Obrigado,” and “Hinweg ists” allow lo-fi textures and environmental intrusion to become substance: phone recordings, ambient noise, the accidental. But Sem is not monochrome. “O crux ave, spes unica” introduces a surprising melodic warmth, while “Não” pushes toward abrasive drone. “Os cacos” carries faint traces of Brazilian modernism—a fractured lyricism that hints at Tropicália without nostalgia.

The album shares little with the extroverted energy of Negri’s earlier song-based work. It doesn’t descend into despair, either. Instead, it practices a quiet reconstruction, treating memory as collage: unfinished sketches, decade-old fragments, sounds from abandoned futures. The closing “Boa continuação”—“carry on”—dissolves into a haze of electronics, water, and static, an ambiguous signal that grief is not resolved but learned to be lived with.