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Phantone, Angélica Salvi’s début album, expresses what we’ve learnt from ehr work in the last few years: she has a unique ability to communicate an express herself freely with her instrument, the harp. Hailing from Spain, but living in Porto since 2011, where she teaches at the Music Conservatory. Her trajectory includes collaborations with Evan Parker, the Casa da Música Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Modelo 62, Brokkenfabriek, Butch Morris, and work developed for Sonoscopia or Balleteatro. The album, recorded during the Encontrarte de Amares, at the Rendufe Monastery, seeks freedom, sonic and the way in which sound can inhabit a space with different layers and allusions to several paths. The “ghost” which exists in the seven pieces in Phantone is quite real, but less formal than you might imagine. More an affirmation than a presence, whether in the places imagined by Salvi’s music or the concrete effects that the recordings in the Monastery produced on her music. Music that one can read, listen, smell, feel and taste.

Throughout the first fifteen years of her activity,  Anna Meredith built a full time career writing music for others. Taking commissions from international orchestras, opearas and cultural institutions, composing symphonies, songs and scores for string quartets, exploring beatboxing ans cultural percussion, her music can be heard anywhere, from the most trivial gas station to the most erudite concert hall. In 2016 she released Varmints, a début album where she juxtaposed crossed rhythms, electronica, confessional melodies and touches of irresistibly addictive pop. It was there that she stepped forward as a composer on the border between what we know and don’t know hot to classify. With FIBS, released in late 2019, again presents a set of bravely idiosyncratic songs, 45 minutes of multicoloured maximalism and perpetual rhythmic reinvention, which present the most impressive and visceral musical richness and accessibility in her career.

From the minds of Raul Mendiratta and Francisco Lima (Jacketx), comes one of the most fascinating new projects in current portuguese music. Named Conferência Inferno, the power duo formed between trips to the cities of Aveiro, Porto and Vila Real, it molds an electronica with an intricate and danceable martial matrix, with added kraut rhythms, darkwave atmospheres and punk DNA. Bazar Esotérico, the first EP, shows us the conclusions of the controversial experiments they have undertaken. The dust of nocturnal portraits of a city callow to the art of being urgent. A dance with the contradictions of a wine tasting in reusable plastic cups. An intermittent messianism, whispered from the roof of a building for sale.

It’s hard to find one weekend out of the year when you can’t find them on stage. From clubs to balconies, from stairwells to biker bars or huge festivals, it’s there that Dirty Coal Train feel comfortable. A power trio with DIY inspiration, created by the couple Ricardo Ramos and Beatriz Rodrigues, they’re one of the most productive and hard working bands in the business, without losing the realness with which they grab on to rock and roll. Since 2012, when they presented their début EP, Killer Brains From Venus, they’ve released more than 14 records, with extensive tours, both within and without their borders. Inspired by 60s garage punk and B-movies, their songs are inhabited by zombies, intergalactic beings, voodoo wizards and the landscapes in these adventures through imaginary worlds.. Primitiv, their most recent album, it’s one of several reasons that lead us to them.

From Erzurum to Abuja, from Hải Phòng to São Paulo, there is no musical past that can hide for long from the fingers and ears of Dj Fitz. In a podcast with friends or on the most diverse and eclectic dance floors, he is the king of psychedelic partying, combining the pulsating with the most melodic, the harshest with the smooth. With gypsy tones and rhythmically directed bass lines, this is the type of music we can’t help but dance to, especially if we haven’t heard anything like it before. It must be seen to be believed.

Our taste for funaná isn’t new. With a debt to popular portuguese rhythms (and from other european countries), as well as ancestral african music, it’s a sort of musical “crioulo” which calls to dance in its most natural, earthly and primary state. Party musica connected to a people’s atlantic soul, it unites urban centers to the periphery, often reflecting life, suffering, joy or the socio-political reality of those who interpret it. It is, along with the morna, coladeira and the batuque, one of the most widespread cape-verdean cultural brands. It’s in this universe of names and music which are nowadays global references, that we find Ferro Gaita, ambassadors (beside the likes of Bulimundo or Finaçon) of a legacy made of ingenuity, emotion, sensuality and visceral feeling. Fundu Baxu, Rei di Tabanka or Rei di Funaná are some of the axes that will mark, in Azores, another journey to the rawer and more vibrant side of this inebriating game between the “ferro” and the “gaita”.

They began around seven years ago as a trance experience between friends.Diego, Juan, Pablo and Domingos, all from Santiago de Chile, they transported their influences anchored in history and traditions from the Andes. to a new era of contemporaneity, marked by rich and minimal atmospheres. In III, their fourth long player, they’re perfected their work of musical creation to deliver their most piercing and optimistic record. Deconstructing their own method of recording (for the first time not recording in a live take with the whole band). II is an even deeper expedition into escapist mental states, a “slow roast” of dance music, trance and krautrock. 

They’re the strangest raver duo in Indonesia, but don’t let that fool you. They explain what has been usaid themselves: “We’re not educated. We’re not exotic. We don’t play world music”. Colliding cultures or music rushing towards lunacy, this is approximately where we find the space occupied by  Gabber Modus Operandi. Born in an Indonesia of muslim corsets, loaded with a long history of colonial domination, ravaged by the legacy of two authoritarian leaders, the music that they make isn’t ready to nestle under any labels. Hallucinating rhythms, blasted at gabber (Indonesian gamelan music) speed, run under melodies which resound with rave party dynamics. On one side there are the productions by Kasimyn, on the other Harem’s performance, in a constant oscillation between the reinterpretation of local rituals, the archipelago’s iconography, the places of metal and the rawness of noise.

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He started off as Giovani Cidreira, in 2017, when he surprised th brazilian critics with Japanese Food, the début album for this singer and composer from Bahia, at the time showing influences  from the reinvention movements in popular brazilian music, post-punk and confessional indie. Today, he presents himself only as GIO, and has as his test of fire MIX$TAKE, a mixtape recorded in collaboration with Benke Ferraz of Boogarins, inspired by names such as Blood Orange, ABRA or Frank Ocean. Here he touches on themes such as freedom, love, violence, racism or the loneliness of the young black man, under sonic layers of electronic and minimalist timbers. A new life, running to unbalanced beats and frankly personal narratives, that will in all likelihood put him, as of today, in the center of the gold mine of young black brazilan artists that are to be absolutely heard.

Gonzo’s story starts in 2013 with the album Dies Irae. Sis years later, producer Gonçalo F. Cardoso began a new chapter of his story with this alter ego, when releasing Ruídos (à portuguesa) a mix of sounds about his country (Portugal), its people and culture. Using traditional portuguese singing, fishing songs, piano scores, field recordings and different electronica, Ruídos is an ode to the ever present “saudade”, and to the future of an ancestral past. Founder of Discrepant, he has retired as a dj but still explores, in Gonzo, some of the most obscure global music, deconstructing, mixing and pasting it into his mixes, and so challenging the conceptions of what we understand as dance music..

In Peccatvm, who are André Gouveia, António Neves and Hélder Almeida are surely one of he references in the history of metal done in the islands. With references connected to doom/gothic, the Ponta Delgada collective made their début demo in 1990 with In Beauty,  consolidating their sonic identity in Just Like Tears, an EP where the rawness and energy of the guitars of Neves and Almeida cross with melodies and textures on piano and synths.In Peccatvm’s sound thickens with string quartets and a touch of “viola da terra” in  Antília (2002), their first digital studio production, which also marks their first incursion in conceptual work. In 2009 they show us MDLXIII, a work about the volcanic eruption which in 1563 devastated the central area of S. Miguel island, where they use texts by historian Gaspar Frutuoso (author of Saudades da Terra) and the participation of other local artists, such as the historic Zeca Medeiros.

Between melancholy, despair, volcanos and myths, in this continuous cross between elements of Azorianness and the sonic and conceptual tropes of doom/gothic metal, In Peccatvm’s work will be the subject of a retrospective in Tremor 2020, before the release of the first long player.

Musical contortionism between two vowels, from semba to samba, passing downstream from a slice of cúmbias, coladeras, and  the kitchen sink, wearing a palm leaf skirt.

There is a rare simplicity in the music of Juana Molina. Daughter of Horacio Molina, a musician with a career in tango, and actress  Chunchuna Villafañe, Juana’s first experience in the arts was as a comedic actress, a genre in which she’d shine until a pregnancy would take her away from the screen. She then rediscovered music, and soon after she released Rara. There was a less than warm reaction from an audience which was still stuck on the idea of her as a comedian on stage. In this new life, Molina conceived herself as a folk singer, inspired by ambient melodies, in constant exploration of states of mind, layers of loops and pop dreams. It took seven records until we landed on Halo, her most recent release and a clear proof that it’s in music that Molina should be. Lightly inspired by the Argentinian legend of the “luz mala” (a sort of luminous mist which floats over lands where bones are buried), Halo draws occult narratives in a trance filled game that leads us to a space which until then belonged to only her. 

When, in 2015,Kathryn Joseph released Bones You Have Thrown Me And Blood I’ve Spilled, she was far from thinking that, from it, there might spring forth a career. She assures that the record was done for herself, as a sort of exorcism of the ghosts left by past relationships and the death of her son. An intimate and disarmingly franc portrait that made clear that one of the most prodigious scottish artists in recent years was being born. That explains the inevitable comparisons with Joanna Newsom, Bjork or Anohni, and from there to From When I Wake The Want Is, the most recent record which solidifies an enchanting vocal style and lyricsm balanced with equal doses of vulnerability. Seeing her live is an experience that The List magazine assures to be “ of a dark and sad beauty, where hearts get broken and stolen in equal measures”.

We find Ko Shin Moon in the exploration of the disconcerting, as the french duo is an avid pursuer of ehtnic-musical experiments. Pushing labels of time and space, Axel Moon and Niko Shin mix acoustic instruments from different parts of the world, analogue devices, traditional music, electronic arrangements, sampling and field recordings in a sort of soundtrack to a voyage of patchwork. The eponymous début album compiles memory from hybrid territories, imaginary landscapes and multicoloured collages, where greek and turkish dance clubs meet tibetan traditional music and the Dabke dance rhythm. With 78 Fragments, released in 2019, they created a sound piece that reinvents the musical archives of Gallica (the French National Library’s digital archive) again proving their ability (seemingly inexhaustible) to create music made of the shrapnel of a form that is at once original and undeniably fun.

La Flama Blanca is the tropicalism activist in Lisbon. Innamorate of South America and an aficionado of the anthropological exotism of what is fun in any hemisphere. The helmsman of the Baile Tropicante monthly residency at Musicbox Lisboa, where he brought some of the most unknown and fine cumbia in the american continent into the daylight, crossing historical references and the most recent producers. Music which is born to be danced to, in that territory without borders, age and shame of being sexy. The same that we listen to on his weekly radio show on SBSR, in several parties around the country, and in cities such as  Madrid, Paris, Londres, Lille, Praga, Oslo or the more exotic Tainan.

When Panagiotis Melidis, the producer who records as Larry Gus, began releasing records, his creations expressed a particular taste for the creation of a dense quilt of patchwork and samples that would sum up the music that he had been listening too. Collecting artifacts here and there, from disco to soul, from hip-hop to psychedelia, if there is one thing that we can say in his defense is that, from 2006 to today, his music is testament to the ability of turning the old into the new, opening doors to a world that seems distant from the one we see at first. Subservient, the most recent released via DFA Records, is not only his most pop record, it’s also the first in which the greaak builds everything from the ground up, without resorting to any outside samples. Sung in english and greek, Subservient walks the tightrope of frontiers, between pop and greek folk, between anxiety and empathy, conceptually recapping Gus’s life as a father, husband artist and human being, in a country that is still putting out the fires of its well documented economic recession.

It was one of the big comebacks in the national music scene in 2019. After being a part of countless projects, from rock to jazz, finding herself again on stage beside the new generation of portuguese music, Lena D'Água began 2019 willing to serve her body up to the party. Desalmadamente arrived at the shops in May, thirty years after Tu Aqui, her last solo record. With her new core band(built on the skeleton of They're Heading West), João Correia, Mariana Ricardo, Francisca Cortesão and Sérgio Nascimento, and with the production touch of Benjamim, the new record gives clues to a new look over Lena’s career. The ten songs, written by Pedro da Silva Martins of Deolinda, are free of nostalgia and challenge us fearlessly to rediscover one of the most important in portuguese music of the last decades.

Matheus Maranhão - or Lil Kyra - was born in Tiradentes, a city in the state of São Paulo, in Brazil. Emigrating to the Azores in 2013, he soon discovered the taste for rhymes, shared with friends and colleagues on the island. He released Falso Poeta in 2017, a first of a series of tracks that he shared on YouTube, with an aesthetic allied to recent trap trends. He rhymes, produces and records with a handful of young local musicians, contributing to another hotspot of creation in the universe of hip hop, within the Azores archipelago.

Luís Gil Bettencourt is undoubtedly one of the biggest names in the islands’ musical landscape. He was born at the Lajes military Base on June 26th 1956, in a family of musicians from the Graciosa island, hired by the american military to form a Big Band, during that decade. With the usual collaboration of his brothers Paulo, Nuno and roberto, as well as his daughter Maria Bettencourt, Luis Gil is the master of a rather eclectic musical basem with rock as its cornerstone. Somewhere along his trajectory he discovered the Viola da Terra de Dois Corações, from which he builds his first exoerience with the soundtrack to the television sereis Xailes Negros. Also with the typical instrument of Azorian culture, to which he added the adufe, he composed the soundtrack to a documentary about the life of José Saramago. Currently, with his daughter, he takes viola da terra to the stages of Hollywood, London and New York.

MADMADMAD are looking for liberation. Through dance and hedonism, they turn music into space to deal with their personal alienation and the mental disorder of the society that surrounds them. At the base, an obligatory reference to the sacred places of no wave, disco and post-punk, presented here after being filtered through the most outsider experimentalism we can think of. The result opens doors to their studio-sanctuary, and  the council of the wills of the jam session. Worth keeping an eye on, as there is a manifesto here that is capable of winning over many followers.

Self-taught musician and composer born in S.miguel, Mário Raposo makes synthesizer music since the 90s, encompassing influences from jazz, classical music, New Age, electronica and soundtrack art. Also in that decade, he was a member of duo Art & Soul and did arrangements for records by azorian music’s prominent figures such as Aníbal Raposo and Luís Alberto Bettencourt, as well as compositions for documentaries and advertising. With a considerable discography since 2007, Mário Raposo presents for the first time under his own name some tracks from his repertoire, in a cross between new age, ambient music, and aesthetics usually associated with the world of science fiction.

They’re one of the most urgent duos to come from the label arm of the Nyege Nyege festival. Mc Yallah is one of the most reputed rappers in her country, spreading a message of integrity and empowerment to the youth of Uganda since 1999. Beside freanch producer Debmaster, they are living proof of the incredible fertility of contemporary Africa’s danceable electronica, creating a serious love affair between lyrics sung in Kiswahili and Luganda (the official language of Uganda) with detailed, demented and distorted productions, which are influenced by hip hop, trap and everything else that involves the bass and te dance floor. An encounter that stutters and roars, that shudders and paralyzes, in demonic jerks up to the red light.

The fruit of two different generations in time, but which have common traits within the life of the archipelago, Milhafre e Gaivota share records found on the migratory routes where life has taken them. At least until the puns with birds and islands become boring.

Milhafre, in his crazy predatory flights, focused his superhuman gaze on Africa and portuguese speaking accents, but found a home in Cape Vert, in the 70s and 80s, in the discovery of synths and the explosion of rhythmic heat that is funaná. There is, of course a lot of semba, rebita and merengue in the talons of Milhafre, which unlike sparrow hawk (Açor), exists in the Azores.

Gaivota, as a bird native to Ribeira Grande with a view over the ocean’s infinite possibilities, decentralizes the focus and exchanges postcards from locations as disparate as Chile, Cameroon or Georgia. Between persian disco, algerian rai or romanian manele, in common there is the potential for each track to shake a dance floor and trigger unusual body movements.

It was in the underground scene of Montreal that the duo of  Chris Vargas and Tobias Rochman started to grow. Somewhere between the diversity of offers that inhabit parties and raves in the most hidden parts of the city, they performed side to side with djs, punks and the most experimental performers in electronica. When they released Movimiento para Cambio, their début long player under the Pelada alias, there was no stopping what they had built. Here, music is a living mechanism, mindful of the moral and political ethos of the duo. Vargas churns out ideas of power, identity, vigilance and environmental justice, under the warm blanket of Rochman’s contrasting mix of synths, breakbeats and rhythms. In these ten tracks there is room for women, for non-binarity, for sexual and gender freedom, to talk about violence (physical and sexual) or to pay attention to the “Big Brother” eye created by big data. There is Montreal, but there is also Rio, London, Beijing, Buenos Aires or Moscow,there will be everyone’s contemporary world, in this music born of the urgency of uniting a multitude that needs to escape itself around new formats of entertainment and struggle.

Push 1 stop (Cadie Desbiens-Desmeules) and Wiklow (Michael Dean) are a canadian dup whose work explores the contact points between sound and image. With live performance as their natural habitat, the duo seeks the creation of intense and organic audiovisual experiences, based on a minimalist aesthetic which alternates between the illusion and the physical, celebrating the pure frequencies and the visual beauty of its waves. Their work has been showcased in North America, Mexico, Europe, Middle East and Asia. To the Azores, they bring Membrane, an audiovisual performance with a live, activated artistic installation in tis epicentre, and which offers the audience in the room an immersive atmosphere.

RomeroMartín travels, without a net, through the poetry of Lorca and the uncomfortable expressionism of Val del Omar. A tireless hummingbird, Álvaro Romero has collaborated with names such as Rosario Toledo, Ángel Atienza, Raúl Cantizano, Pedro (Los Voluble) Jiménez or Álvaro Romero, certain that any art that matters is, by its very nature, promiscuous. Unpredictable and adventurous, he joined producer  Toni Martín to bring flamenco to era 2.0, blowing up ideas of gender and questioning limits. From an electronic base which sounds like an almost industrial legacy, supported by lyrics by homossexual poets like Chilean Pedro Lemebel, Álvaro Romero and Toni Martín offer an educated journey, without brakes, through the abyss that separates love from hate.

Samuel Martins Coelho has been on a path of discovery and constant reinvention of his musical language. With training rooted in classical music, he has created his own style that, using different sonic sources crosses musical genres and universes, touching on conceptual, experimental and improvisational music. An active member of several projects under his own name and in collaboration with others(EL RUPE, Estranhofone, Mods Collective, Space Ensemble, Escola do Rock, Pata Física), Samuel is also a collaborator with the collective  Ondamarela, Teatro Experimental do Porto, Máquina Agradável and Comédias do Minho. He develops several activities within his communities and leads active musical interventions, aimed at children and the general public, collaborating with several artists in dance, theatre and performance art.

In 2019 he released Partita para violino solo, his contribution to contemporary music and the writing of violin music, where he explores the processes of introspection, transformation and deconstruction of the self.

Founder of psych-funk band Garotas Suecas and regular collaborator of Yonatan Gat, the name Sessa won’t be news to those more attentive to the brazilian and american music scene. In Grandeza, the début solo album, he has discovered the space to explore his vision regarding the immense sonic landscape of Brazil. So, it’s no wonder that in this record, which he classifies as a homage to his country, one can find the visceral and sensual qualities of the word (recalling the path created by Caetano Veloso), and the melodic arrangement of someone who grew up listening to  Tom Jobim. But Grandeza doesn’t stop there. In an effort to condense the richness of rhythms and textures in brazilian singer-songwriter music, a new way is uncovered, pointing to the future: that of complex simplicity as a starting point of what is beautiful.

By now, it’s become natural to assume that there is something special in the water of Barcelos. Although we don’t know exactly what, it’s true that what it’s done for rock in this country is admirable. Solar Corona were born of the creative bubbling in a city that shows how to write rock with crooked lines. As it should be. Formed in 2013, in 2016 they reached a consensus as to their lineup and settled for a foursome, with Rodrigo Carvalho (guitar/ synths), Peter Carvalho (drums), José Roberto Gomes (bass) and Julius Gabriel (saxophone / synths). After the release of three EPs between 2013 and 2016, Solar Corona got to “Lightning One”, the first LP, the fruit of years of labour seeking the sound that would triumph with this lineup. Here, Solar Corona wear and take off the robes of stoner rockers, and pave a highway to hell of accelerated rock, full of hypnotic desires, and with full reasons to want to be pop and very desired. “Lightning One” is a journey at the top, with the correct coordinates in the mix, under the guidance of  José Arantes, mastered by Chris Hardman and with artwork by Serafim Mendes, who transcribes into an image the immensity of psychedelic-tropical roads that merge in Solar Corona.

When immunologist A. David Napier arrived at one of his more fundamental beliefs, he published The Age Of Immunology, a book in which he made clear that the idea of survival could only be conquered through the elimination of the “non-self” that had dangerously spread outside the universe of medicine, infecting everything in its path. For Vanishing Twin, the term (which lends its name to the début album) is born of disillusionment. A five-piece made up of members from Belgium, Japan, Italy, France and America, the band that since 2015 has been based in London, could not remain quiet when faced with the imminence of hardening borders in the country they had chosen to live..The Age Of Immunology, released by Fire Records is, therefore, more than a musical creation, a record with a keen eye for the uncertainty created by growing populism in the old continent, a soundtrack for those who believe in the pluralist dream, who embraces the other, and learns from him. It is so, not only in the lyrics, sung in the members’ mother tongues, but also in the music, wth nods to  Sun Ra, Morricone, Jean-Claude Vannier or Stereolab. Vanishing Twin are Cathy Lucas (vocals), Valentina Magaletti (drums), Susumu Mukai (baixo), Phil M.F.U. (“strange noises”) and Elliott Arndt (flute and percussion).

The Fat White Family empire seems to expand infinitely. Alongside Insecure Men or The Moonlandingz, Warmduscher are another of the “Family”’s younger children. Formed by The Saulcano (Saul Adamczewski), Mr. Salt Fingers Lovecraft (Ben Romans-Hopcraft) and several former members of the FWF, the collective seems to f the genetic impositions of their ascendency: taking a traditional musical genre and doing everything within their reach to destroy it.. It was like that with Khaki Tears and once again with Whale City, a sort of rock opera which, according to the band, serves as a fairground for all of those who’ve managed to escape their comfort zone. On Tainted Lunch, their most recent record, they added two extra cooks,  Quicksand and Cheeks, and the best imported ingredients that money can buy,  Iggy Pop and Kool Keith, serving up the warmest meal of funk, punk, hip-hop and lounge rock. If you can’t take the heat, you better leave the kitchen.

More info soon.

More info soon.

More info soon.

More info soon.

More info soon.