Inside Cibelle’s spacecraft, the Brazilian diva’s glitchy electronic-diary log is looping through 14 personal poems, titled The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves, played to a sweet and strange samba electronica somewhere between Bebel Gilberto and Björk. Bouncing off the ship’s hulls, these beautiful songs echo like a futuristic time capsule of “travel poems,” sung in Portuguese and English, and scored to a tropical folksiness with mechanical parts, weird computer effects, and loads of odd sampling (from children’s toys to beatboxing).

“I would grab whatever I had nearby and record with whatever it was. Maybe it was an instrument, but maybe it was glass or a mug. I was like a nine-year-old in the studio,” says Cibelle, from her new home in London. “These big masses of sound would embrace the whole poem. And through time, we did sculpture work and took some bits out, so we could reveal what the poem means — and the whole emotion around it.”

The result is a spacey bossa nova soundtrack, created as much with machine as with mortal soul. Just don’t expect the São Paulo princess to sound like that live. “It sounds louder live. The album is quiet and more strange. Live, it’s very psychedelic, with loads of delays and feedback going on.”

This article appears in Sep 13-19, 2006.