Alabaster DePlume is not doing things properly, and this makes him very happy. Composer, saxophonist, activist and orator, he's a resident at the London creative hub Total Refreshment Centre, a recording artist for Lost Map and the latest member of International Anthem’s growing family of progressive musical explorationists. His latest album, To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1, contains naturally elegant orchestration wrapped around something visceral and primordial. A record that combines new compositions alongside bygone instrumentals and understated lullabies that feel like they’ve been picked from between the cracks of civilisation. 

Artists and creators, Ana and João met at college, having worked together, in the 90s, in the theater group Olho. Since 2002, they’ve worked in the fields of performance, dance, installation, photography, sound and video. Ana Borralho and João Galante are a couple in life, an entity with two bodies, an essential biographical element for understanding their work. Together with Mónica Samões, they created the cultural association Casabranca and are artistic directors of the Verão Azul Festival in the Algarve.

The São Miguel Deaf Association (ASISM) has the mission of developing and creating support structures for deaf citizens, guaranteeing their autonomy, individuality, their rights and the response to their needs, acting in an integrated manner on topics like exclusion and encouraging the exercise of active citizenship. It promotes cultural, recreational and artistic activities, as well as intervening in the media to raise public awareness about the issue of deafness in all social aspects.

A trio of psychedelic minimalism, Bitchin Bajas should not be new for the most avid and attentive consumers of live music in Portugal. From Musicbox to Madeira, from ZDB to Milhões de Festa, several stages were already marked by the American collective composed by Cooper Crain (keyboardist from Cave), Dan Quinlivan and Rob Frye. In their most recent album, Switched on Ra, they continue a work they’ve begun with Bajas Fresh (the 2017 album that motivated the last tour in our country): reinterpreting eight more songs by the cosmic jazz legend, Sun Ra.

Coral São José was formed in 1967 to brighten Eucharist and Solemnities at the Church of São José, in Ponta Delgada (Azores). It was formed as an association in 1996 and was recognized in 2000 as an Institution of Regional Public Utility. Its live concert life started in 1990, with the representation of important and recognized compositions by Gounod, Rossini, Handel, Mozart, Verdi, Beethoven, Puccini, Haydn, Santos Pinto, Carl Orff or Gershwin. Since 2012, it has been developing the Música no Colégio project - the only event dedicated to choral music in the archipelago of Azores. Currently, with about 65 members, Coral São José develops the functions of Symphonic Choir, Chamber Choir and Liturgical Choir, in addition to promoting Musical Training classes.

Ece Canlı is a researcher and artist. Its investigative tools include text, voice, sound and artifacts. Her work focuses on feminist and queer epistemologies, decoloniality, material regimes and bodily politics; more specifically, socio-spatial-material constitutions of gender, sexuality, race and other categories of identity. In 2020, she edited her debut album, Vox Flora, Vox Fauna, via Lovers&Lollypops.

The Rabo de Peixe Music School (EMRP) integrates up to 70 students residing or originating in this parish of São Miguel. EMRP aims to contribute, through music education, to the development of children and young people from this community. They are also the resident structure at Cine-teatro Miramar. EMRP is a social, artistic and community project.

Jonathan Tavares sees music as a pure language or a form of expression/meditation. Throughout his career, as a self-taught musician, he has been exploring different musical contexts, from flamenco to progressive rock, in order to better understand how music can provoke reactions in the way people perceive reality. Through the guitar, Tavares explores the essence of the interpretive and changeable dimension of music, in freedom essays on how the same theme can be presented in multiple formats.

L’Eclair is a cosmic instrumental six piece from Switzerland. The band crafted a unique sound melting nods of Afro-Disco, Kosmische Jazz and early House. With three LPs, an EP and two 7’’, the band acquired a solid reputation in the global groove scene. L’Eclair is the perfect soundtrack against a modern society where time isn’t an option, nor even a possibility, and where humans and machines aren’t that dissociated anymore.

A firm name in the new Portuguese music scene, Maria Reis has been developing a solid work as a singer and songwriter. Founding member of Pega Monstro, the punk-rock band she founded with her sister, she debuted solo with Maria, an EP where she began to explore the pop painted portraits of a generation, hers. Following this first record, Chove na Sala, Água nos Olhos, an album widely applauded by the specialized press, and A Flor da Urtiga, produced by Panda Bear and released in the middle of the pandemic. For 2022, Maria Reis brings us a new record, Benefício da Dúvida, recorded at a residence in the city of Viseu (Portugal), where she experimented with the campaniça guitar and climbs yet another floor in the way she composes and writes songs.

ondamarela collective conceives, develops and implements collaborative artistic projects. Above all, they are interested in the relationship between a specific place, a group of people in that place and an artistic gesture built on sharing. They’ve worked with communities in Bragança, Ílhavo, Guimarães (European Capital of Culture 2012), La Valletta (European Capital of Culture 2018), Historic Villages of Portugal, among many other projects.

Odete is a transgender Portuguese activist, artist, performer, producer and Deejay born in Porto, she now resides and works in Lisbon where she has been researching on sensations/notions of belonging and “awareness”, trans narratives and ways of making visible sadness, fragility and "failure" as political powers .

Peter Evans is a New York-based trumpeter and composer. His work has broken genre conventions and is part of the vast cast of productions that use experimentation as the ignition point for the creation of hybrid and dialogic music scenes. Peter is committed to the self-determined and collaborative nature of musical improvisation, envisioning it as a compositional tool. He has been working with a growing group of musicians and composers to create new music. John Zorn, Peter Broetzmann, Pauline Oliveros or Kanye West are some of the names you read in his long list of collaborations, Evans is also the founder of the More is More label.

At the shifting boundary between free jazz and improvised music, Rodrigo Amado’s position on jazz is clear: he plays jazz. That said, when we get the chance to hear him play it becomes clear that he doesn’t need any predetermined elements of rhythm, harmony, chorus length or melody to play it. There’s a rhythmic impetus, a bite in his sound, part grain, part beat, and it drives his lines forward, a sound and an impulse that is both his and a fundamental impress on the world that tenor saxophonists like Coleman Hawkins or Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis have been making for generations. Having played with many Portuguese and internationally renowned musicians, Amado is also the leader of various formations, such as Lisbon Improvisation Players, Wire Quartet or Motion Trio.

You may know Rodrigo Amarante already. You may have heard Tuyo, his theme tune to the television drama Narcos, or the Little Joy album, band he created with Fab Moretti and Binki Shapiro; you might have noted his name among the credits on songs by Gal Costa, Norah Jones and Gilberto Gil; or perhaps you saw him play live with Brazilian samba big band Orquestra Imperial, or with Rio rockers Los Hermanos. Solo, Amarante has released Cavalo, in 2014, and Drama, in 2021, where he experiments his work in new paths and horizons.

Founding member of the Brazilian group Garotas Suecas and regular collaborator of Yonatan Gat, the name of Sessa will not be new for those more attentive to the Brazilian and American music scene. In Grandeza, his debut solo album, he discovered the space to explore his own vision of what is the immense sound territory of Brazil. Hence, it’s not surprising that on this record, which he classifies as a tribute to his country, one finds the viscerality and sensuality of the word, recalling the path created by Caetano Veloso and the melodic arrangements of those who grew up listening to Tom Jobim. But Grandeza doesn’t stop there. In an effort to condense the richness of rhythms and textures of Brazilian singing music, a new path  pointing to the future is discovered: that of complex simplicity as the first point of what is beautiful.

Moroccan expatriate hardcore/punk band, based somewhere in Europe (the band members wish to maintain anonimous), Taqbir’s music takes up the flag of religious freedom and freedom from religion. Their commitment to spreading a message of freedom through punk fury has as first evidence their name: Taqbir, the local variant of “Allahu Akbar,” a phrase the band describes as a battle cry. Harsh, riotous music that slides between punk and post punk, they draw with Victory Belongs To Those Who Fight For A Right Cause vicious circles fueled by each drop of the drums and the guitar where their lyrics come across as a rallying cry.

Francisco Madureira and Paulo Lopes are the musicians responsible for all the music Victoria sings. Not that the themes are about them, but about the reality that surrounds them and that they distill through the fictional character they created to head up a musical quest they have been developing.

Started in the 2019 edition of Tremor, this has been an evolving work that unites the S ão Miguel Deaf Association da with the creation collective ondamarela. In each edition, the challenge is based on the creation of a unique moment, somewhere in between the concert and the performance, which reflects on the concerns, ideas and artistic interests of those involved. For the 2022 edition, the show gathers with extra arguments involving the oldest choir in the archipelago: Coral de São José - Musical Association.

In Greek mythology, Atlas was the one who was condemned to carry the earth and heavens on his shoulders. Based on this classic representation of the figure and ideas of Joseph Beuys, visual artist who defended that the revolution has the individual as its ignition point, the performance Atlas - São Miguel aims to bring together, on the same stage, 100 people from different professions, creating a map of human social organization based on the role each person plays in society.

Exploring processes and mechanisms of group and communitarian creation, which make art emerge in the personal and social life of each of the participants, the performance-piece Atlas-  São Miguel will build a silent revolution, which broadens the notion of social sculpture and entrusts the art of taking an active role in society.

The Atlas São Miguel project is coordinated by Ana Borralho and João Galante.

The meeting of two absolutely unique worlds is the proposal of this concert that involves the Turkish artist based in Porto, Ece Canlı, and the trans-activist, performer and producer Odete. From the first, we got to know the body of work around the potentialities of the voice, an instrument with which she designed one of the most special and idiosyncratic albums of 2020, Vox Flora, Vox Fauna. From the second, it is impossible not to know the already vast work (in music, writing, performance and visual arts) with which has been creating an archive about the LGBTIQ+ community and its trans-historical identity. Music for the liberation of bodies, opening doors to new feminist and queer epistemologies and other categories of identity.

In 2022 Tremor dares to create an orchestra. Inspired by what we know is a close relationship between a certain representative generation of island musicians and modular synthesizers, this project aims to create a unique and punctual group that, under the coordination of the psychedelic trio Bitchin Bajas, will propose one of the most unique and anticipated moments of this year's edition. The collective will be created from an open call launched to the local community, in which musicians (professionals or amateurs) who have synthesizers will be able to register.

The festival's resident band, the Rabo de Peixe Music School works so that children and young people from this parish of Ribeira Grande can have access to unique and diverse musical experiences. As part of the work developed within the Tremor festival, they have contacted and created with musicians and artists from different backgrounds, such as ZA!, the project O Gringo Sou Eu or Jerry the Cat. In 2022, they will be joining the North American trumpeter and composer Peter Evans and Portuguese saxofonist Rodrigo Amado, in a collaboration that once again focuses on experimentation, the exploration of hybrid sound universes and creation around traditional and modern languages.

Completing its work of connection with the local communities, Tremor integrates, every year, an artistic residency program, through which it expands its area of action towards the development of opportunities for original creation, crossing of artistic languages and community artistic practices. 

Epicentro is a site-specific exhibition designed for São Miguel Island and curated by Tremor, which features musicians, visual and sound artists from the Azores and overseas.

Mini-Tremor is a program for children and their families with proposals of artistic installations, performances, jam sessions of dance and music.

Tremor na Estufa is an adventure: the audience is invited to a small trip into a secret place on the island for a surprise concert. Participants are informed about the location on the day of the show, being able to travel there using their own means of transportation or by Tremor bus. We advise to take an umbrella, a rain jacket and comfortable shoes.. It is mandatory to carry an ID. It’s forbidden to drink and smoke under the premises, as well as bringing food or drinks. Entrance is subjected to screening and searching.

Tremor Todo-o-Terreno are secret hiking trails in São Miguel to be discovered with a  recorded and live soundtrack.

Carried out by the partnership between Tremor festival and the Archipelago - Contemporary Arts Center, UniTremor will organize a four-week training cycle that will serve as a training opportunity for new local cultural agents, in a continuation of the work that both entities have been developing towards the empowerment of the territory and its community. 

More info soon.