After serving as guitarist in the no wave outfit DNA and the punk-jazz ensemble the Lounge Lizards, Arto Lindsay launched Ambitious Lovers, a project marked by comparable excitement and scope, while also participating in the formative lineups of the Golden Palominos. Born in Richmond, Virginia in 1953, he spent part of his childhood in Brazil because his parents worked there as missionaries. At the outset of his career he started merging the Brazilian pop sounds absorbed during those years with the textural density and experimental drive he cultivated inside the Lower East Side noise-rock community. Consequently his work fronting Ambitious Lovers moved beyond unrelenting atonal abrasion toward a precise fusion of dance-pop accessibility and exploratory textures. Keyboardist Peter Scherer, his principal partner in the group, helped shape the debut album Envy, which preserved a sharper dissonant quality and therefore remained closer in spirit to Lindsay’s earlier DNA recordings. The follow-up, Greed, emerged as a polished, buoyant pop statement clearly descended from the Brazilian pop tradition exemplified by Jorge Ben, Caetano Veloso, and Gilberto Gil. Although its brisk, dance-floor tracks softened the abrasive undercurrent more than some listeners might have preferred, the record achieved near-perfection. Its successor, Lust, lived up to its title with a heightened sensuality while remaining compelling modern pop. Despite never moving hundreds of thousands of copies, Ambitious Lovers consistently justified their name across successive releases.
Once that band concluded, Lindsay deepened his engagement with Brazilian music, contributing to projects by Marisa Monte, João Gilberto, Gal Costa, and Tom Zé. In the mid-nineties he began releasing music under his own name, opening with Aggregates 1-26 on the Knitting Factory label, an album that returned to the skronk aesthetic of his DNA period. After moving to Bar/None for Mundo Civilizado, he restored the Brazilian elements and incorporated stronger electronica components. Several further Bar/None releases preceded his arrival as the first non-DiFranco artist on Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe imprint, beginning with The Prize. Invoke appeared in 2002 and Salt in 2004, each illustrating his distinctive merger of Brazilian music and downtown avant-garde practices. In 2009 the Belgian experimental imprint Sub Rosa issued the self-titled debut of Anarchist Republic of Bzzz, a Seb El Zin project that enlisted Lindsay alongside fellow New York downtown figure Marc Ribot and experimental rappers Sensational and Mike Ladd. Originally available solely on vinyl, the album received a compact-disc edition from Important Records in 2012. Lindsay joined Norwegian free-jazz drummer Paal Nilssen-Love for a 2013 concert in Rio de Janeiro that Nilssen-Love documented the next year on his PNL label as Scarcity. Around the same period he surveyed his catalog with Encyclopedia of Arto on Northern Spy, pairing a disc of earlier material with a set of live solo performances. In 2017 Lindsay disclosed that he had been residing in Brazil for several years after relocating there for health and insurance-related reasons; that same year he released Cuidado Madame, an album centered on rhythms drawn from the Brazilian religion candomblé.
