Damião Ferreira da Cruz (September 27, 1935 – December 10, 2016), better known by his stage name Damião Experiença, was a Brazilian singer-songwriter, lyricist, multi-instrumentalist, record producer and compulsive hoarder. Considered to be a major icon of the Brazilian countercultural scene and one of the country's most famous and prolific outsider musicians, he was praised by figures such as Tony Bellotto, George Israel and Rogério Skylab, and also constantly compared to schizophrenic outsider artist Arthur Bispo do Rosário and musicians Frank Zappa, Moondog, Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra, Jandek and Father Yod. His albums, usually sold by him in the streets or even handed out for free when he felt like it, became much-sought collector's items, and his reclusive, eccentric and unpretentious personality has attained him a passionate cult following. Biography Damião Ferreira da Cruz was reportedly born on September 27, 1935, in Santo Amaro de Ipitanga (present-day Lauro de Freitas), Bahia, although this has never been independently verified. He experienced an unhappy childhood and was constantly mistreated by his parents, which led him to run away from home to Rio de Janeiro when he was between 10 and 13 years old. As a youth he served as a radar operator for the Brazilian Navy; while in the Navy he allegedly fell off a ship's crow's nest, hitting his head on the floor, which could have provoked his erratic mental state. It is also said (in his autobiography which comes as a bonus booklet on some of his albums) that once he was sentenced to solitary confinement for many years due to desertion. After his precocious retirement from the Navy in 1963 (probably because of his accident), he went on to live with a prostitute in a stilt house in the vicinity of the bairro of Estácio, became a pimp and was able to produce his records thanks to money obtained via procuring. Damião's first known recording was a guest appearance on Luiz Melodia's 1973 debut Pérola Negra – he provided backing vocals for the track "Forró de Janeiro" –, and subsequently came to adopt the stage name "Experiença" (a corruption of the Portuguese-language word for "experience", "experiência") as an homage to his favorite band and major influence, The Jimi Hendrix Experience. In 1974 he self-released his first album, Planeta Lamma, and many others followed throughout the 1970s to the early 1990s. Damião also claimed that, during this period, he toured