Arthur Morgan “Arto” Lindsay was born in Virginia in 1953 but was raised between the US and Brazil due to his parents’ work. Considered one of the intellectuals of rock music, he is influenced by giants like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, by the free jazz and American experimental music.

Arto made his debut on the music scene when at the beginning of the Eighties, he founded, together with keyboardist Peter Scherer, the dance-pop band Ambitious Lovers. The band’s first album was 1984’s Envy, a record presenting an elegant rhythm that perfectly balanced the noise music tendencies of the artist and the traditional Brazilian music influences. Envy was followed by Greed in 1986 and Lust in 1991.

During the Nineties, Lindsay was even more involved in the Brazilian music movementand began collaboratingwith luminaries of the genre like Tom Zè, Marisa Monte, and Joao Gilberto, who brought him to publish his first solo album. He released Aggregates 1-26 in 1995 which presented itself as a collection of vanguard songs, establishing the record as the noise genre’s standard. Arto released his following effort, Mundo Civilizado with Bar/None Records, a label with which he would collaborate until 1998. 

Lindsay became the first artist to publish an album with Ani Difranco’s label Righteous Babe. He started with The Prize in 1999, followed by Invoke in 2002 and Salt in 2004, each of them exhibiting his distinctive summary of Brazilian music and vanguard guitar arrangements.