Biography
Paul Mounsey, A Scot Abroad
Paul Mounsey was born in Ayrshire, Scotland and raised in Ross-Shire in the Highlands. He studied piano and composition with Richard Arnell at Trinity College of London, and graduated with Honours. After a spell at the London International Film School (where he studied Film Composition), he taught briefly at Goldsmith's College, University of London.
His met his Brazillian wife Dorinha at Trinity, and soon moved to São Paulo. He was creative director of a major Brazillian record producer for ten years, and now runs his own production house called Junk.
His commercial work has been extremely successful. As a song writer, aside from his solo work, his composition Cuarenta Grados, written for teen band Magneto, sold three million copies when released by Sony Mexico.
For some time, whenever he listened to any traditional Scottish folk music, particularly that sung in Gaelic, he felt terribly home sick. Perhaps because he didn't have any Gaelic, he felt the music was somehow alien, but also similar to Native American. One day, he decided to play around with some samples and remixed them with other forms of music. The result was "Passing Away". He decided to go further with the project, and Nahoo was born
Paul and the Nahoo crew
To accomplish this, he teamed up with a group of musician friends and Janjão Vasconcelos, Grammy nominee and demon sound engineer. The project aimed to fuse pop rhythms and the latin influences of his adopted home, with the traditional sounds of his native Scotland. It took two years in the studio to produce, but the result was ground-breaking. Critical acclaim for the album followed, despite many reviewers not knowing how to categorise the material! Cultura FM in São Paulo even ran a series of radio programmes profiling the talented Scot.
1995 saw Paul in the studio again, this time to record his follow-up album. By 1996, he was ready to pursue his life-long interest in native peoples, and embarked on a tour of the Amazon to visit and record the music of the Tuparí, Makurap, Arikapú, Gavião and Arara nations. These recordings provide a strong influence on the second Nahoo offering, NahooToo.
Following the release of NahooToo, Paul's solo career went on the back burner for a while, and he concentrated on his other commerical work. During his musical career, he has worked with a variety of well known names, from many genres, including Etta James, Chico Buarque, Jimmy Cliff, Antonio Carlos Jobim when he was alive, and recently Bahian percussion group Olodum.
His latest offering in the Nahoo canon, Nahoo Three - Notes From The Republic was released by Iona in 1999. It follows broadly the successful fusion of Scots folk and Latin rhythms, with some beautifully haunting instrumentals. Most recently, he was asked by Scottish band Runrig, (whose song Alba he re-recorded for the original Nahoo release) to arrange a song for their new album The Stamping Ground. The resulting track, Running To The Light, is a perfect collaboration between himself and the band, at once instantaneously recognisable as Mounsey and Runrig at the same time.