Having, at great cost, left the position of programmer to dedicate himself to the herculean task of conceiving Ponta Delgada’s European Capital of Culture 2027 candidacy, the much-missed António Pedro Lopes (co-founder, from Ponta Delgada and Tremor’s programmer between 2014 and 2020) was unanimously described by the other three members of the panel as the programmer who caught “the hardest fish to sell”. Mal Devisa (Tremor 2018), the terrifyingly raw and honest poet from Massachusetts, is proof that sometimes the best sound meals are cooked with off-the-menu fish.

«It was very hard to reach an agreement with an artist like Mal Devisa, who played at Igreja do Colégio. She was very difficult to contact, no one had ever seen her live. We had only heard one of her highly celebrated records. She was an artist without a manager, the only available contact was her mother’s, and communication was challenging. It got to the point where we didn't know if the concert was even going to happen. The situation in its whole was tough. But then, when it happened, it was a quick 25 minutes — it must have been one of the shortest concerts that took place at this festival — but it was like a bomb had dropped there. It was drool and snot, such was the power of the bass, the strangeness of it, the very artist's presence. After all this, in addition to all the people who were there and who never forgot that moment, the reward was seeing a photo of Mal Devisa during her performance at the church as a featured picture in an article that the newspaper Público made about the festival, with the title: “Tremor was a happy story and it wants to contaminate the rest of the year”.»