During the festival’s long run, some criticism has emerged painting Tremor as a caricatural performative festival, laden with unintelligible music and forged only to bring about the collapse the traditional Azorean culture. The legacy Tremor has been building over all these years, and continues to build, demonstrates that these criticisms are obviously unfounded. However, there was a decision in particular that on the programmers’ part that, if well argued, could even justify this “slander”. Luís “Kitas” Banrezes (co-founder and programmer of the festival) is responsible for bringing Sturle Dagsland to the Azores in the 2016 edition:

«In one of the editions, a Norwegian artist called Sturle Dagsland appeared in an e-mail. I tried to find out a little more about the project and saw that he was playing at the Iceland Airwaves festival. When I saw the video of the concert, I found a comment saying: “This was the worst Iceland Airwaves concert ever!”. I called António Pedro Lopes and said: “We must hire the guy. The guy must come to the festival!”. When we picked him up at the airport, he came out jumping, yo-yo in hand, in one of those OktoberFest outfits, complete with a hat. He is the strangest character that has ever passed through this festival. The hotel where he stayed in called us because supposedly there were loads of weapons in the hallway. We went there and there were no weapons, it was just his instruments. Everything was so primitive (things made of leather, castanets and even some instruments made with sticks) that they thought he had brought loads of weapons to attack the Hotel’s employees. His concert was at Galeria Fonseca Macedo. Fátima Mota (gallery director) just stood there, looking at him as he played the drums with his feet while eating an apple. All you could see were pieces of apple sent flying against Urbano's (Azorean artist) paintings. I have never seen Fátima so panicked.»