When Jussi Brightmore moved his young family to Portugal in the Summer of 2020, exploiting a brief easing of lockdown restrictions and the last months before Brexit’s transition period ended, he was excited for a fresh start. Trading London for the natural beauty around Lisbon, his band Gum Takes Tooth – beloved in experimental circles for their crushing, airless EBM – would give way to something new, and perhaps more optimistic. While it wasn’t yet clear this would be the writhing, ecstatic dance music of 2rana 3crana – responsible for the extraordinary new EP Olivine To Emeralds, Sceptre To Thunder, exclusive to tQ subscribers – he claims “a new start was absolutely necessary.”
Shortly after moving, that new start was derailed by an abdominal injury which severely reduced Brightmore’s mobility – leading to surgery, then lengthy rehabilitation. After recovering once, Brightmore suffered a second injury which meant repeating the whole process again. “Moving incredibly slowly made me really start to look at the world around me,” he says, which – despite the physical difficulty – heightened his appreciation of his new home. “There’s this rich biodiversity of plants and animals,” he says. “The world around me was one to be celebrated.” During this period of “static rediscovery,” singing and playing instruments was out of the question, limiting him to making beats on a computer. That fit nicely, however, with one of Brightmore’s biggest takeaways from the experience: “a huge appreciation of physical movement,” he says. “I wanted to make dance music, because I wanted to dance.”
This led to 2rana 3crana: an extraterrestrial drag persona (under which he uses they/them pronouns), playing a technicolour, elastic fusion of industrial techno with the Afro-Portuguese batida rhythms popular in his new home. He was already a fan of Lisbon’s Príncipe label, responsible for some of the city’s most progressive dance music, but became exposed to other sounds upon his arrival. “There’s also a huge Brazilian presence in the music here. I think a lot of what’s gone into this music is what I’ve heard on the radio – the whole musical environment,” he says.
“My first gigs were in Lisbon clubs, particularly one called Desterro who were very supportive of me,” Brightmore says – building a fan-base through the underground, largely secretive parties held by the likes of Pyromania, Nariz Entupido and Datacentre. It sounds like a happy time, emerging from a post-recovery period of “wonderful optimism – an appreciation that we never know what can happen in the next moment, and things can be taken away from us.”
Just as the project began to build momentum through 2023, tragedy struck. “On the edge of Autumn, my brother fell ill and ultimately died of cancer,” Brightmore explains. Devoting his time to supporting his family during that difficult period, “the idea of partying and dancing wasn’t relevant to me,” and the project seemed destined for the scrapheap.
At last year’s Supernormal Festival, Brightmore was in attendance with his family, and got invited by Repeater Radio to play some tracks on their sound system. Using the 2rana 3crana demos on his USBs to put on an impromptu set, the crowd was electrified. Brightmore even left the booth himself, to dance with his young daughter. “It was such an ecstatic moment,” Brightmore says. “It re-fired my energy for the whole thing.”
At last, then, 2rana 3crana has begun to release recordings into the world – starting with recent singles ‘Verniz Peregoso’ and ‘Time Ripple’. The former, he says, means “‘dangerous nail varnish’. It’s inspired by my experience of the scene around Lisbon – various clubs, nights, friends. In my head it’s like an interdimensional dance battle.” It’s ludicrously fun – combining the progressive batida sounds of Principe alumni like Firmenza or Nídia with the eccentric decon-club of artists like Mun Sing. Interestingly, where the tracks are at their most energised, they tip into searing industrial. Are those power-drill whines in ‘Time Ripple’ not signifiers of a cold and alienating urban landscape then, as it might’ve seemed in Gum Takes Tooth, but the sound of extreme happiness? “As far as I understand,” Brightmore smiles, “the reason we’re excited by distortion is it’s a little bit painful – our body flinches, and we love that.”
Now, 2rana 3crana has completed the astonishing Olivine To Emeralds, Sceptre To Thunder. With the history of these tracks ranging from almost two years to, Brightmore tells me, “two days before I sent it to you guys,” there’s even more going on. There’s the hedonistic, interdimensional ‘body music’ of ‘Crash Era’, but the lurching, abstract title-track – reminiscent of the strange wistfulness found in Mutant-era Arca – is accurately described by Brightmore as “disembodied.”
For the live shows, 2rana 3crana is also a drag persona: their otherworldly costumes reminiscent of Jenkin Van Zyl, Johannes J. Jaruraak’s work as Hungry, or Matthew Barney’s hallucinatory Cremaster Cycle films. “It came from this whole experience of moving to a new country, rehabilitation and emancipation,” Brightmore says. “There’s a real prerogative to embrace life and reinvent, and create something that reflects the newness of experience – not just doing a gig, but celebrating the moment of the gig.”
It’s a superb EP. For all their variety (and brilliance), Gum Takes Tooth’s recordings have largely maintained a degree of claustrophobia – perhaps influenced by the duo’s movement to London from the less densely populated cities of Brighton and Oslo. 2rana 3crana – borne of rehabilitation and recovery in the radically different setting of rural Portugal – is “a much more brightly, richly coloured experience of sound,” Brightmore says. For him, it represents the new start he had wanted: “this world of expanded possibility.”
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