Lovers & Lollypops was created in 2005 as a result of the characteristic DIY urgency, the impulse to make things happen and the desire to document and publicize all the music that excited us at the time.
Seventeen years and more than a hundred records later, that's still the main motivation: to record what has been one of the most fertile moments in musical creation in Portugal and beyond, through record publishing, promotion and agency.
From the very beginning and alongside its publishing activity, L&L has organized concerts and festivals - including the iconic Milhões de Festa and Tremor - in a constant act of reinvention, searching for new paths and languages, which come together around founding ideas such as freshness, lyricism and persistence.
After a (let's say well-deserved) month on the sidelines, Lovers & Lollypops is back at work for another four months of concerts, residencies, events and editions. And what better way to make the transition between the beach and the city than with the talents of one of the names that has made us dance the most this year? Yes, Ugandan alchemist Faizal Mostrixx is returning to Portugal for another immersion in his repertoire of fusion between ancestral African rhythms and more futuristic electronic movements.
On September 14 - from the Rua de São Vítor venue - we'll also be celebrating the second semester with performances by the duo OMNE, made up of Joaquim Durães and Patrícia Brito, and Horto.
Accompanying the musical proposals is a menu of snacks by Ana Ferraz.
Maria Reis is making her comeback as a solo artist and her concert in Porto has already been scheduled. September 27, at the Lovers & Lollypops Space on Rua de São Vítor 143-A, Porto.
Suspiro - released earlier this month and created in collaboration with producer Tomé Silva - continues to show us the uniqueness of Reis' work, in a universe marked by a new maturity in the lyrics and arrangements. An attentive and sensitive observer of the intimate and surrounding space, Maria Reis continues to explore the word in a way that is very much her own, in a poetic act that is as brutally honest and raw as it is full of imagistic allusions.
Arianna Casellas and Kauê present their latest album "Suenan las Campanas".
Solar Corona is composed of Nuno Loureiro (synthesizers and processing), José Roberto Gomes (bass), Pedro Carvalho (drums and percussion) and Rodrigo Carvalho (synthesizer guitar).
Marie Davidson makes her debut in Porto. It's not often that things with a more personal dimension achieve universality. This is probably one of the reasons why Marie Davidson's work manages to touch so many people. Born in Montreal, Canada, Davidson is a producer, DJ, singer and songwriter. Active for over a decade, her music thrives on an idiosyncratic vocal delivery and an ever-expanding sonic palette. On stage, Davidson has been gaining fame for the unique way she mixes incisive percussions, haunting synthesizers and captivating melodies live. Proof of this is the still recent memory of his appearance at the Tremor festival.
Jibóia present “Salar”
Phantone, Angélica Salvi's debut album, expresses what she's been learning with her work over the past few years: she has a unique ability to communicate and express herself freely with her instrument, the harp. Born in Spain, but a resident of Porto since 2011, where she teaches at the local Music Conservatory, her career includes collaborations with Evan Parker, Casa da Música Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Modelo 62, Brokkenfabriek, Butch Morris, and works developed for Sonoscopia or Balleteatro. Phantone, recorded during Encontrarte de Amares event inside the Rendufe Monastery, seeks sound freedom and explores the ways though which sound can inhabit a space using different layers and paths. The “phantom” that exist in the seven pieces of Phantone is very real, but less formal than you think. More an affirmation than a presence, whether in the imagined places of Salvi's music or in the concrete effects that the recording in the monastery induced in her music. Music that you read, hear, smell, feel and taste.
Booking: jose@loversandlollypops.net
It was after a performance with Jacco Gardner that Jasper Verhulst fell in love with the sound of 70's Turkish music, when names like Selda, Barış Manço and Erkin Koray began to cross local tradition with elements of western rock. Alongside Ben Rider and Nic Mauskovic, they began their search for Turkish musicians who could help them revive this sound. They found Merve Dasdemir and Erdinc Yildiz Ecevit on Facebook and “stole” Gino Groeneveld from Jungle by Night. Taking the repertoire of the Turkish heroes who inspired them, their contemporary peers and the songs of the traditional songbook, Altın Gün reinvent the marriage between East and West, in a cross language between funk, psychedelics and rock. On his debut album, On, the four Amsterdamers settle definitively in this no-man's-land adventure between the two worlds.
Booking: marcio@loversandlollypops.net
Interdisciplinary artist, Ava Rocha is an illuminator, photographer, costume designer, illustrator, actress and cook. A hyperactivity that she inherited, to a large extent, from her parents (film director Glauber Rocha and photographer, poet, filmmaker and artist Paula Gaitán) who, from an early age, exposed her to a multiplicity of artistic languages and creativity. Appointed as one of the most interesting Brazilian artists of her time by the New York Times, she built a repertoire that carves out of Tropicalismo but has a wide open eye to what is outside, proving that Brazilian contemporary music has been discovering new worlds outside its grounds. In her most recent record, Trança, she strike us again with a forward-looking pop, intertwining rock, funk, post-punk, electronics, African and Amazonian grooves and percussions.
Ava Rocha, participated in albums by artists such as Jards Macalé, Negro Leo and Gustavo Galo and projects like “E Volto Pra Curtir”, “Mulheres of Pericles” and the movie JARDS. She is part of Baile Primitivo - a collective of political art that sings sambas of social contestation; having also composed soundtracks for cinema, where she worked as an editor.
Booking: marcio@loversandlollypops.net
In 2018, a griot (name given, in West Africa, to those whose vocation is to preserve and transmit the stories, knowledge, songs and myths of their people) from Burkina Faso met the post-punk noise duo from Brussels Le jour du seigneur. A meeting in a world of travelers that opened the doors to the construction of a new space of knowledge where know-hows from different latitudes come together. Since then they have been developing a unique universe between experimentation without a net and incredible post-modern grooves. The trio mainly plays Kaito's compositions, to which contributions from all members are freely added. They return to Portugal to show their self-titled debut album, released in June 2022.
Booking: Márcio Laranjeira
They´ve stolen their name from Mão Morta, the bass groove from Sleep, the guitar fuzz from Hendrix and the drums in locomotive mode from Earthless. Like the Sex Pistols, with what they´ve stolen, they created something new and unic: not a punk van, but a stoner spaceship with only two speeds - the orbit and the escape, propelling us into the sidereal vacuum where a riff stretched to eternity seems to last just long enough to induce trance. Owners of what is probably the most fascinating psych rock born in Portugal, the collective arises from the effervescent movement of new bands coming out of Barcelos in the late 90s. Today, with seven releases and a handful of the most relevant collaborations (from Peter Brotzman to La La La Ressonance, from Jonathan Saldanha, to João Pais Filipe), they are one of the most referenced bands in Portuguese underground.
Booking: jose@loversandlollypops.net
They´ve stolen their name from Mão Morta, the bass groove from Sleep, the guitar fuzz from Hendrix and the drums in locomotive mode from Earthless. Like the Sex Pistols, with what they´ve stolen, they created something new and unic: not a punk van, but a stoner spaceship with only two speeds - the orbit and the escape, propelling us into the sidereal vacuum where a riff stretched to eternity seems to last just long enough to induce trance. Owners of what is probably the most fascinating psych rock born in Portugal, the collective arises from the effervescent movement of new bands coming out of Barcelos in the late 90s. Today, with seven releases and a handful of the most relevant collaborations (from Peter Brotzman to La La La Ressonance, from Jonathan Saldanha, to João Pais Filipe), they are one of the most referenced bands in Portuguese underground.
Booking: jose@loversandlollypops.net
Boogarins' “Dinho” Almeida and Benze Ferraz have been playing music together since their boiling adolescence. In his parents' gardens they began to create psychedelic pop, filtering the rich Brazilian musical culture through modern lenses. Going from duet to quartet, with Ynaiã on drums and Raphael on bass, their editorial debut, As Plantas Curam (2013), left Brazil and Portugal holding hands and kneeling in front of the dirty amplifiers that scream beautiful things. From there they gave us Manual, a record that reconfirms them as four the most exciting rock'n'rollers who have ever made the Pedro Álvares Cabral route, and, in 2017, Lá Vem a Morte, a record released with no warning. In 2019, they made a clear step towards internationalization, with a fourth album recorded in Texas that proves the band's continuous desire to explore the various studio potentials. Sombrou Dúvida is a picture of the present world, unstable and pessimistic, while simultaneously trying to reverse all this with the positivism of technology. A record that runs in the tightrope, questioning relationships and their place in the world, in a set of songs that whispers the uncertainty of the times while saying that everything is fine.
Booking: marcio@loversandlollypops.net
Carne Doce are one of the most important bands coming out of the new creators harvest that appeared in Goiana, Brazil. Founded in 2013 by couple Salma Jô and Macloys, who then were joined by João Victor Santana and Aderson Maia,the band has built around a reputation for being one of the most explosive and sensual bands to play live, today, in Brazil. With Tonus, their third studio album, they’ve solidified a place in the authorial scene of the country, further consolidating their journey through intimacy, human vulnerability and power games.
Booking: marcio@loversandlollypops.net
In September 2016 Haitian vodou band Chouk Bwa meet the Brussels based duo The Ångströmers. This new project combines a new dub sensitivity and Haitian rhythm science and spirituality.
Modular synths and other vintage electronic instruments bring another dimension to Chouk Bwa’s music, although obviously it is always the band’s groove and fluent tempo that leads the energy of the ensemble: no laptops, no drum machines. There are certain freedoms that cannot be coerced. Even more, the electronic instruments are wired directly to the drums that feed them with impacts and caresses. All the Vodou families are there with their many rhythms and songs. Radical Vodou roots for urban audiences.
Booking: Márcio Laranjeira
COBRACORAL is a project that entwines the voices of Catarina Miranda (Portugal), Clélia Colonna (France), and Ece Canli (Turkey). Each brings their artistic vocal practice into the coil: Miranda's choreographic exploration of orality, Colonna's researches into Eastern and Mediterranean polyphonic singing, and Canli's extended vocal experiments. The resultant a cappella braid threads time into a structure that maintains the cohesion of a common pulse thru the variegated dynamics of reaction and adaptation.
Booking: José Roberto
Guitars held high amidst thick smoke, snooker games where no one sinks the black, and over 666 beers spilled fraternally between body, floor, and counter. Cobrafuma is a troupe of Porto proto-veterans who heeded the Cobra's call amidst sketchy malls, bars with sticky floors, incarcerated by the damp rock wool that shields the outskirts.
In their eponymous brawl, released in 2023, the sound is tough as steel and brimming with venom, slithering between genres that answer to no one: punk, thrash, and rock 'n' roll, hissed in Portuguese and liberally drenched in unlabeled firewater brandy, to shake your helmet as if there were no tomorrow.
Booking: José Roberto
Two singular voices mixed in hypnotic polyphony carried along by the beat of tambourins à cordes, feet and hands. In an explosive head-to-head, the two musicians share and develop their complementary vocal personalities, woven together over 10 years of artistic collaboration. Cocanha cultivates minimalism through the sincerity of acoustic sound supported by amplified percussion that engages their bodies in the dance. The Occitan language (official language from the French Cataluña) is their playground for exploring unique and inspiring textures and sounds. Cocanha draws from the traditional Occitan repertoire, generating movement around forgotten archives and transporting them to contemporary oral tradition.
Booking: Márcio Laranjeira
Francisco Lima, Raul Mendiratta and José Miguel Silva are the members of Conferência Inferno. In early 2021 they revealed Ata Saturna, their first LP. Born on the road in Portugal, but established in Porto, they delivered us the mirror of dehumanization, with distressful lyrics full of social criticism. Influenced by dark wave and post punk movements, Conferência Inferno are proof that we don’t need drums nor guitars to be punk. Something we already knew from Bazar Esotérico, EP released in the summer of 2019, when they were still a duo, in which they registered night portraits of an inexperienced city in the art of being urgent.
Booking: jose@loversandlollypops.net
The last few years have been busy for João Pais Filipe. From the edition with the experimental duo Paisiel to the homonymous solo album, the collaborations with portuguese bands HHY & The Macumbas and Black Bombay, to the international meetings with Burnt Friedman, GNOD, African percussionist Omutaba and Peruvian master Manongo Mujica, there has been little time for the percussionist and gong builder to stop. Hence the challenge for what became a beautiful love story, came from his label: Lovers & Lollypops. The idea was for him to see a Tomaga concert, one of the projects of Valentina Magaletti, but the chemistry between the two was instant. From there they've forged TheGolden Path, the first album released under the moniker CZN. Nocturnal, visceral, erratic, immersive, the “golded route” through where they both guide us places music and its historical role at the center of human spirituality: uniting instinct with discipline, reality with the dream, the finite and the eternal.
Booking: joaquim@loversandlollypops.net
They are one of the most exciting bands we know, especially due to the way they take into a unique psychoactive journey, that grabs the most primitive influences of Brazilina culture and turns it into something new and mind-blowing. A kind of sonic Ayahuasca marked by the rhythm of Brazilian polyrhythmic percussion, hypnotic singing and the most raw and pure punk. With Metaprogramação, their most recent release, they take this mixture to totally new extremes, building a narrative in which the songs merge and dissolve, where electronic is mixed with the power of rhythmic fabrics, all frantically created to print and design this “psychic scenario for primitive future”. A psychedelic and wild journey that is destined to reach the mind through the body while intoxicating both.
Booking: joaquim@loversandlollypops.net
Ece Canlı debuts solo with Vox Flora, Vox Fauna, a series of soundscapes loomed by extended vocal techniques, extralinguistic poetry and other instruments. The path of the turkish artist living in Porto has been paved by several collaborations: NOOITO, duo with the harpist Angélica Salvi; Live Low, band from Porto started by Pedro Augusto; and Cobra’Coral, vocal trio with Catarina Mirand and Clélia Collona. This first work in her own name was recorded in an artistic residence in Alpendurada, in a dirt store, where potatoes and onions are usually stored. The environment and energy created by the lighting of the space incorporated the record, which evokes and crystallizes the incorporation of human-animal-nature.
Booking: jose@loversandlollypops.net
Gaye Su Akyol is an Istanbul-based musician and artist. In her work, she redefines the concepts of power, desire, change and rebellion, hand in hand in tight-knit solidarity with women, queer and outcast communities, and rebels against societal gender roles, patriarchy, censorship and oppression. She creates a universe of imagination, in which she constructs her own “counter-reality” against the stifling realities dictated by the power. Without alienating herself from the land she was born into, she questions its representations, defines new symbols, and while struggling with the complexities and political chaos of the concrete world, she chases after the
practice of transforming a conservative world through collective dreaming.
Gaye Su Akyol has created her own unique language, taking the contrasts of traditional Anatolian music, Classical Turkish music, psychedelia, surf rock and post-punk and combining them with her futuristic approach.
Booking: Márcio Laranjeira
Ghost Hunt are not chasing ghosts, nor do they want to scare anyone, but the music they make could be the soundtrack of a rave in a haunted house. They grew up in the same city, Coimbra, went to the same school and were practically of the same class, but they never belonged to the same "tribe". Pedro Chau, from The Parkinsons, has always been more connected to punk; and Pedro Oliveira, a former member of Monomoy, has always been closer to the indie universe. Today, older, they form the electronic duo Ghost Hunt. Age is like that, it awakens our ears and minds to other influences that have always been there within our reach, but that we didn't even know we had.
Booking: josé@loversandlollypops.net
Booking: joaquim@loversandlollypops.net
Since 2018, Inês Malheiro has been building a solo repertory that has as its raw material a voice that weaves sound narratives. From The Endless Chaos Has an End, a series of songs uploaded to SoundCloud, to liquify, spread and float (2022), a album-performance improvised live and edited at the beginning of 2022, as well as other the sound design for Práticas Laboriosas do Enxofre (2022), Canal-Conduto (2020) with Gonçalo Penas, and Organismus Kathársis (2020), co-created with Francisca Marques. Deusa Náusea, her newest album, oscillates between fragmented dreamscapes and feverish nightmares, exploring the mind and the subconscious through spectral sounds of sublime beauty and broken vocals that compose the soundtrack to our oneiric episodes.
Booking: José Roberto
João Pais Filipe is a drummer, percussionist and sound sculptor from Porto, born in the 80's. His path as a musician is marked by the collision with a wide range of styles and languages in bands such as Sektor 304, HHY & The Macumbas, Unzen Pilot and Fail Better !, Paisiel or CZN. While maintaining a regular activity in the improvised music world, he has participated in numerous projects alongside Burnt Friedman, Steve Hubback, Fritz Hauser, Evan Parker, Marcello Magliocchi or Rafael Toral, to state just a few.
His music comes from the construction of gongs, cymbals and other percussion metal instruments, where he explores the sculptural dimension and the acoustic properties of the instrument. As a solo artist he advances through the exploration of the tension that can be created between the mechanic and the organic, the repetition and the loop, the dance floor and the mantra, creating a space for his own labeled ethno-techno where dancefloor cadences are appropriate and reinterpreted in a custom percussion kit designed by him.
Booking: jose@loversandlollypops.net
Jorge Coelho carries in his fingers the force of the generation that would dictate the rhythm of music production in Porto. With a background strongly rooted in the city's sonic culture, the guitarist explores the many possibilities of strings within various fronts, sometimes bending conventions with Torto, sometimes honing the art of storytelling fingerpicking under his own name. Invariably, and with the dexterity of those who were born to this, it is with his winding instrument that Jorge Coelho proceeds in a straight line, continuing to establish himself as a force in the art of writing music.
Booking: jose@loversandlollypops.net
Julius Gabriel's music is, in its only apparent abstraction, haunted by the earlier lives of saxophonists whose music has passed through time like an unprecedented gust of sound. In “Dream Dream Beam Beam”, his first solo album, the German saxophonist organizes his idiosyncratic musical influences to create a flowing mantra of circular patterns, overtones and free jazz eruptions, that can be understood as the possible synthesis of a long jazzy tradition interspersed with imaginative drone and noise intrusions. In his most recent work, Ætherhallen, Julius Gabriel keeps his tendency, with a pass in the psychedelic and a detour to the minimalist. Julius Gabriel's improvised compositions sound like eccentric dust particles dancing, in slow motion, under the twilight until the end of time, proposing to those who hear them a requiem for eternal life.
Booking: jose@loversandlollypops.net
Killimanjaro veni vidi vici. Rock of the best kind, exported from Barcelos, Portugal, they brought the refreshing to what was stagnant. From classic metal to its more muscular deviations, from the Sabbath school to the Iron Maiden leather, they developed a perfect technique of adding line and sinker to the chop, remaining undefeated in the art of inducing bodies into a well-justified headbang. The refined craftsmanship they built lives for the stage, where, in one grasp, they dispel any doubts about what they are here doing: Killimanjaro know how to throw a Mike Tyson style hook without tearing our ears off.
Booking: jose@loversandlollypops.net
We don't know who had this idea, but for us it would deserve a medal. To join the one who is, without a doubt, the best and most crazy vocalist that this country has seen (a title that he exhibits, by its own merit, since the mid-nineties with Zen and recently renewed in the insanity of the Plus Ultra) to Greengo, probably the biggest driving force that Invicta saw arise through puffs loaded with intention and acidity. Gon finds the ideal chariots of fire on Martelo's bass and Chaka's drums to launch himself into an endless list of diatribes about isolation, alienation, corruption, the consumer void dazzled by technology or corporate culture. The sound that we are given is brutalist and, to a large extent, impossible to contain. Music that requires resonance and space to be felt, that grows urgently in the carbonary spirit that forces us to reflect about life without hypocritical rules and responsibilities. Let us reject, with them, the idea that we have to become an ideal, a devout comrade of unique thought, far from being an individual and not just part of a tribe.
Booking: jose@loversandlollypops.net
Brought on a psychedelic breeze directly from Istanbul, Lalalar mixes Anatolian funk, sampling and feverish electronic music. Fast-paced music, futuristic beats and contagious energy are some of the possible descriptions for the ten singles released so far and their debut album, Bi Cinnete Bakar. On their first travel to the Azores, expect to dance and experience with all the senses.
Booking: Márcio Laranjeira
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The musical prowess of Nicola Mauskovic, drummer Jacco Gardner, sketched in studio with friends Donnie Mauskovic, Nik Mauskovic and Mano Mauskovic offers us a unique musical experience. Digging within 70's afrobeat, the cumbia and all the hypnotic sound that can provoke the most balanced and felt dance, an inquestionable son of the distinct routes of each of its members, The Mauskovic Dance Band is a the definitive symbol of celebration in today's music scene. The eponymous debut album, edited under the unquestionably relevant Soundway, grips back into the universe explored with Down In The Basement, they first EP, filtering out the clear influences on Colombian and Peruvian Afro-Latin music through the lens of contemporary Amsterdam. A “controlled explosion,” as The Quietus calls it, based on a professed love for the champeta, palenque, psycadelic cumbia, chichi and picó soundsystem culture.
Booking: marcio@loversandlollypops.net
The ability to provoke, call for attention and transform in less than two minutes reveal the talents that are necessary in a time of constant explosions. Cavala, Maria Beraldo's debut album, dies and reborns several times throughout its ten songs. All concentrated in 24 minutes. Her instant and sudden transformations reflect the urgency of Maria's message and the desire and fearlessness to assume herself as a lesbian woman in the Brazil's contemporary songwriting universe. “Cavala” its a rip with everything, even her own past. Formerly clarinetist in Arrigo Barnabé's band, Maria is also a part of Quartabê and Bolerinho and has collaborated with people like Elza Soares, Negro Leo, Iara Rennó and Rodrigo Campos. Details to illustrate the new life, laden with the ambition of showing herself as a composer and an architect of pop fables that can be weapons to sweeten our ears and transform our minds. Who said that screams couldn't be sweet?
Booking: joaquim@loversandlollypops.net
Marlene Ribeiro is best known for her decade of work with Gnod (UK), as well as having taken part in numerous collaborations, recordings and projects with artists from the U.K. and abroad. A more recent example of this, with Percussionist Valentina Magalleti as Due Matte. Marlene explores a range of live instruments, field recordings, electronics and voice, aiming to create a dream-like haze with elements of psychedelia.
Booking: joaquim@loversandlollypops.net
As we say in Portugal, those who go through Alcobaça do not live their lives without returning there. Unless you are already a local born and apart from worshiping the art of local convent pastry, you endured on the veneration for another less ancient art, that of making rock and roll. It would have been something like this that marked the upbringing of Mr. Gallini, who was born in the portuguese small village of Pisões and whose parents named Bruno Monteiro. He started his rock life as a drummer Stone Dead, brothers born in the same region, with whom he has toured all over Portugal. Not forgetting his mother land, but also seeking to find his own space as a solo artist, Gallini released Lovely Demos, his debut album in 2018, and introduced in 2019 his successor - who is also the second volume of an announced trilogy. The Organist shows Gallini's pop side, following the milestones of rock (choruses, youth, electricity), but leaving room for other more electronic tools (keyboards, theremins and vocoders) to breathe too, creating an album that, at the same time, pays its dues to the 90s brit-pop and the 50s space era, but sounding lively and up-to-date, without falling into the marshlands of mere nostalgia.
Booking: jose@loversandlollypops.net
OTROTORTO never walked in a straight line - the musical exercise of the trio that joins Jorge Coelho, Jorge Queijo and Miguel Ramos twists the traditional formation of guitar-bass-drums with challenging harmonies and melodies that are not looking into the familiar grounds. It is in the tension that they are resolved and in the dissonance that they sing and enchant, creating a disconcerting language that engages and develops on its own terms, but with music frequencies they all share. OTROTORTO are suspended without ever falling and revealed themselves as fluent and fluid storytellers. “Letargia em Ré Menor” was the last release of these symphony masters, a sound metaphor about the power of comprehension, restraint, gravity as a force, and the effects of leaning into free will.
Booking: jose@loversandlollypops.net
Paisiel is the enigmatic name of the project that unite drummer, percussionist and sound sculptor João Pais Filipe to German saxophonist Julius Gabriel. Based on an individual exploration of the sound and expressive possibilities of the instruments they play, the music made by this duo systematizes references without correspondences or obvious affinities. Textured and abstract melodies propelled by a simultaneously mechanical and existential percussion that metamorphoses into a kinetic transe. Heterodox and digressive musicians, moving freely between experimental music, jazz, rock and the other indecipherable new musical categories, João Pais Filipe and Julius Gabriel create radiographic music that is somewhere between reception and broadcasting, like a cosmos telephone exchange.
Booking: jose@loversandlollypops.net
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As the country burns with boredom, Sereias get totally immersed in the jazz-punk that promises to be the anthem of a campaign that needs to hit the streets. In the center the poetry of A. Pedro Ribeiro (the “unblessed” poet, anarchist and ex-candidate for Portuguese Presidency) in a constant shock with the turbid, electronic and immersive environments of the sonic masters that accompany him. With their debut album they set the country on fire, throwing us with only a single stroke to the couch. And how the portugueses artistic community needed it! A political, social and philosophical treatise, created in a time when all of this represents an affront to the status quo, to the great teacher. Written with deceptive violence, between the lines of provocation, in the epidermis of a breastplate where you can hit at will. Not only in its lyrics, but also in its music. In this avantgarde, punk, free jazz and post-rock format that causes the voluntary eruption of the senses, in the freedom of execution and in the denial of this same conventional posture. A “zapplian” indiscipline that takes us to the territories of This Heat, Pere Ubu or The Fall. And if the record represents a demeaning audacity in this multiplicity of profiles, live praxis is not only direct, untimely but cannibalistic and exasperating. The balance remains at the base of the extremes and they look so uncomfortable on stage that they end up keeping the focus on the audience.
Booking: jose@loversandlollypops.net
Sessa name will not be strange for those who keep a close look the modern Brazilian and American music. Founder of the psych-funk duo Garotas Suecas and regular collaborator of Yonatan Gat, Sessa is one of the most promising new voices coming out from the vibrant São Paulo scene. In Grandeza, his debut solo album, he discovered the space to explore his own vision on the vast and diverse Brazilian sound territory and history. Hence it is not surprising that on this album, which he classifies as a tribute to his country, one finds the viscerality and sensuality of the written and spoken word (remembering the sexual lyrics of Caetano Veloso) and the melodic arrangements of those who grew up listening to Tom Jobim . But Greatness doesn't stop there. In its effort to condense the richness of rhythms and textures of South-American singer-songwriting history, it discovers a new path, pointing to the future, where complex simplicity is the starting point for beauty.
Booking: marcio@loversandlollypops.net
When rock became a pop ornament, it forgot what was important: a cohesive band, guitar looking bass straight in the eyes, the bass on top of the drums, the cymbals exploding with the guitar riffs; an electrifying communication cycle. Stone Dead haven't forgotten what made rock an explosion impossible to contain, half a century ago, and brought these teachings to today's bodies, with an even hotter fuzz and an even more prevalent bass, proving wrong what many have been trying to predict: rock is dead. No, according to Stone Dead it’s fine, it rolls on riffs as much as on hook, and can be recommended.
Booking: jose@loversandlollypops.net
By this time it has become natural to assume that Barcelos' water can carry something special within. What it is we can't be sure, but what it has been doing for Portuguese rock is an admirable achievement. Solar Corona were born within the creative bubble of a city that shows how to write rock with crooked lines. How it should be. Formed in 2013, in 2016 they've reached a stable formation and settled in as a quartet, with Rodrigo Carvalho (guitar / synthesizers), Peter Carvalho (drums), José Roberto Gomes (bass) and Julius Gabriel (saxophone / synthesizers). Following the release of three EPs between 2013 and 2016, Solar Corona reached Lightning One, an album that summarizes the result of years of hard work searching for the sound that would triumph in this lineup. Lightning One is a trip to the top, with the right coordinates in the mix, made by José Arantes, mastered by Chris Hardman and artwork by Serafim Mendes, which transcribes in an image the immensity of psychedelic-tropic roads that merge into this Solar Corona.
Booking:jose@loversandlollypops.net
Born out of endless COVID-lockdowns and an indomitable creative force, Tramhaus is the sonic project of a group of friends who share a love for everything that touches the realm of post-punk. Feeling more comfortable in the unknown and the impassable, the band keeps reinventing itself, working mainly at the boundaries of the said genre. Lyrically the band also likes to cross borders: from outspoken punk songs about failing governments to introspective ballads on suicidal emotions. Altogether this creates an unforgettable live experience, which is praised internationally for its energy and liveliness.
Booking: José Roberto
In the summer of 2017, Kees Berkers and Yves Lennertz began writing and recording songs at a ballet school in the isolated village of Plateau de Doenrade. Avid record collectors, Yin Yin bring to their music the variety of genres we can find on their own record shelves. Departing from 1960s and 1970s South Asian music, they lead us into a multilingual journey, with stops in world music, funk and electronics. Pingpxng, their debut cassette, symbolizes this, explaining, in detail, how two apparently opposing forces can act in complementarity.
Booking: marcio@loversandlollypops.net
Papadupau and Spazzfrica Ehd have been testing the limits of human sound creation for more than ten years. The catalan duo is responsible for more than half a thousand live concerts on five continents and six albums that explain, in detail, the multiple possibilities of polyrhythm. The latest, Pachinko Plex, does it without becoming overly analytical, summarizing global influences and having the technique as a compass though the chaos that only them can build. A step forward in the DIY experimentation that they like to nickname as post-worldmusic, and in the free spirit with which they look at your own music, Pachinko Plex is yet another unmissable and rambling journey through melodies, percussions and clutter.
Booking: joaquim@loversandlollypops.net
Alto!
Aspen
Arp Frique
Black Bombaim & Peter Brötzmann
Cave Story
Dreamweapon
Duquesa
Equations
Filho da Mãe
Glockenwise
Green Machine
Gonçalo
Jacco Gardner
Jibóia
Larkin
Les Filles de Illighadad
Live Low
Long Way to Alaska
Loosers
Medeiros / Lucas
Memória de Peixe
Mr Miyagi
Samuel Martins Coelho
Sequin
Stone Dead
The Comet is Coming
Throes + The Shine
Recorded live at the iconic Cafe Oto in London, this is the first recording of Solar Corona in their Elektrische Maschine version, an opportunity to separate the meat from the bone and reveal how the quartet knits its cosmic tapestry, authentic exploratory electronic flow without limits and without end.
Conferência Inferno have been exploring the depths of post-punk over the last years, figuratively digging into the genre’s grimy trends for dark tones, and more literally casting its gothic undertones through ritualistic approaches, sacrificing the never-existing drummer to the gods of drum machines and delivering heart-felt, hell-raiser performances. Their delving went further down after the debut release Bazar Esotérico with their first LP Ata Saturna, which led to a remix album done by fellow cultists. It is thus safe to say the Porto-based trio are very much versed in the dark arts of electric rock, and punk diatribes, and are leading the genre in Portugal.
Pós-Esmeralda, released by Porto main agitators Lovers & Lollypops, sets the record straight regarding their wits, and sets them apart from fellow post-punkers, delivering a unique object in the space of goth music. Conferência Inferno have grown to develop a unique, still very much electronic, bright approach to their genre, bringing in more vivid tonalities to their music, and creating more cheerful melodies, imbuing the whole record with a snarky mood. This ongoing tension between dark thoughts, cheerful melodies, and murky bass finally matches the never-ending irony of their lyrics, where a learned knowledge of Portuguese coexists with the more colloquial and regional use of the language, making it both scholarly and working class, a quantum superposition mess that not many have been able to reach.
The joyful use of major chords sets the tone early in the record, with Raul Mendiratta’s synths and José Silva’s keyboards defying Francisco Lima’s howls of desperation. The first side is a crescent in melodies, as much as in dancing energy, with rhythmic exhilaration helped by syncopated synths, and notorious heavy frequencies. The second side of Pós-Esmeralda delves deeper into the dark minds of the trio, with slower, minor melodies depicting hallucinatory experiences that lead to post-punk, upbeat anthems Alma and utmost ironic Distopia.
Conferência Inferno reunited once again to cast the gothic enchantments, practice dark rituals and draw the astral map of post-punk. All planets are now in retrograde, all ascendents in Saturn, and the moon is set in all darkest positions, all dancing to the macabre invocations of the trio with their new age, new wave, new tuga approach to irony, bleakness, ecstasy, and smirks. Let us dance together then — because we’re all bodies.
Pure and hard, that's how rock craves. The clattering of tough boots on worn gravel, guitars held high amidst thick smoke, snooker games where no one sinks the black, and over 666 beers spilled fraternally between body, floor, and counter, like the holiest of trinities, three elements of the same substance, of the same substances, for if the counter can bear the weight of the body, the body can endure the floor, there's no other choice.
Emerging at the peak of the pandemic, Cobrafuma is a troupe of Porto proto-veterans who heeded the Cobra's call amidst sketchy malls, bars with sticky floors, incarcerated by the damp rock wool that shields the outskirts.
In this first eponymous brawl, the sound is tough as steel and brimming with venom, slithering between genres that answer to no one: punk, thrash, and rock 'n' roll, hissed in Portuguese and liberally drenched in unlabeled firewater brandy, to shake your helmet as if there were no tomorrow.
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Co-released in vinyl by Keroxen, Discrepant, Gandula, Indian Runners and Lovers & Lollypops. Released in CD in Japan by Moorworks and in Australia by Valve.
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A travelogue that unites physical and inner space, a series of trance states rendered in vivid colour, a delirious portal into the ether.
Marlene Ribeiro’s first albumunder her own name is all of this and much more. Toquei No Sol is a fresh new chapter for this unique artist, by far the most melodic and transcendent outing yet for her hypnotic dreampop.
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The motoric return of Solar Corona turns minimal rock into an expansive, ever-churning psychedelic voyage in their newest offering, PACE.
The band's fifth release, PACE, shifts gears with Lorr No (Nuno Loureiro) hitching a ride as a dubmechanic that pulls the sound of Solar Corona's core trio—Rodrigo Carvalho (Guitar/synths), Peter Carvalho (drums), José Roberto Gomes (bass)—into an off-road expanse. The stripped-down songwriting reaches a new power through its simplicity.
The raw ideas of each track were jammed out in Alpendurada, a town deep in the Douro Valley. After a two-year distillation process the riffs and sonic materials have reached a concentration not unlike the alchemical moonshine native to Solar Corona's Portuguese North. Simple principles and steadfast mechanics become channeled into perennial journeys where speed & pace remain distinct.
Each track celebrates a specific element in its own way. The introductory Heavy Metal Salts establishes the pulsing impulse of PACE, with sparkling electroacoustic details bringing a lysergic dose to the climactic structure. The title-track Pace mellows out Solar Corona’s soundscape, and stands out as a space-mantra without riffs, solos, or the need to headbang. Guitar-led tracks such as Thrust and AU return to the in-the-red rock-n-roll that is a constant pulse in the veins of the band, before being injected by their new, more ethereal, sonic. The incessant groove of Parker SP built out of bouncing bass and straight-ahead drums provides the ground for the other members to lift-off into a spaced out atmospherics. Alpendurada closes the album in epic proportions as the band weaves in and out of knob-twisting psychedelia and instantly earwormed guitar melodies anchored by a propulsive bass.
Solar Corona's last two efforts, LIGHTNING ONE & SAINT-JEAN-DE-LUZ (both released in 2019), were also as a four-piece with Julius Gabriel's electroacoustic sax brought along for the journey. Gabriel's departure from the band in 2020, left a seat open for Lorr No (Fugly, Favela Discos) to bring his own patterned twist to the band's progressive stonerism. Solar Corona’s PACE takes its listener on an ambitious journey.
For fans of the expansive rock music of acts like Endless Boogie, Circle, Pharaoh Overlord, Hawkwind, and GNOD.
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There’s something familiar in the sounds that Angélica Salvi creates. In her previous record, Phantone, it was easy to get lost in the idea of nostalgia / past that could be listened coming from her harp. For Habitat, her second record, the approach is tremendously different. She doesn’t linger in the past, she expects you to fulfill the present side-by-side with her.
The idea was to create music that could be played and processed in real time. It is also the first time Angélica Salvi is working around the idea of songs – instead of pieces – and elaborating on narratives that suit that purpose. Recorded in May on her own studio – Garagem 16 -, Habitat is contemporary music with the essence of pop, in line with the likes of Mary Lattimore, Rhodri Davies or Nala Sinephro, musicians that in the last years paved the way for the instrument to be an important part of the conversation.
Contrary to many of her peers, Angélica doesn’t exactly try a genre approach. Her music is freer of those restraints and shows her freedom of thinking music as a musician but also as someone that has been working on film and constantly shows her creations more in the essence of sound than exactly music per se. The sounds of Habitat, since the first seconds of Nan, the opening song, are ethereal and melody focused, even if sometimes those melodies chase paths that are somehow labyrinthic.
That doesn’t mean that the listener gets lost. There’s always a guiding light. The choice for a more direct approach on this recording proves how clear, enlightened, and focused Angélica Salvi’s sounds is. There’s no tricks. Just something that sounds real, profound, where you can listen to Angélica’s hands moving and touching the strings. And be completely mesmerized as she continues to pursue melodies that guide the listener to the most beautiful of places.
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Deusa Náusea being intimately unusual, balances you as in the cradle of a feverish baby with its fragmented beauty and her delicacy that serpentines our brain. Polarised, reversed, perplexed, epithelialized by espectral processes and beleza pura. Chunks of voices chopped and minced in the metric drip leave you in continuous tele-transformation, by centrifuging our deepest interiors as if she would like to break with just enough strength the structural matrix of a song. Inês Malheiro, with her peripheral vision and a bouquet of Gerberas and Peonies, makes this day an anisotropic pleasure.
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Debut album by RA FA EL, solo project by Rafael Ferreira (Glockenwise, Evols, Septeto Interregional, Duquesa).
The eponymous EP grew from a constant collaboration with other artists and therefore, what was supposed to be a solo work, ended up being a kind of “big band”, where the various terminologies of pop music serve as a shelter for the six songs. Exploring and deepening Rafael Ferreira's work as a composer, the album features collaborations with Éme, Primeira Dama, Vítor Nuno Santos, Zé Pedro Vinagre, Tiago Ferreira and April Marmara.
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“Recomecemos tudo de novo” shouts A. Pedro Ribeiro as he unveils the new Sereias album, creating space for an abrasive guitar to wander over a persistent rhythm and keyboard incursions with jazz-rock reminiscences of the 70s. This is the motto for the new album, a new beginning where we find the free rock of the Sereias in all its splendor, a mixture of post-rock and kraut in continuous progression, tense, obsessive, overwhelming, with games of textures and winks to free-jazz, contemporary music and some tribalism. From this sonic cauldron comes the psychotic voice of A. Pedro Ribeiro, sometimes shouted, sometimes murmured, sometimes declaimed, sometimes choleric, sometimes depressive, and his raw poetry: a coffee shop poet throwing invectives against the world or sharing existential lamentations. Unlike “O País A Arder”, their debut album, there are fewer buzzwords here, like “quero um primeiro-ministro para comer ao pequeno-almoço (I want a prime minister to eat for breakfast)” or “as putas da tv (the whores on TV)”, and greater despair in the face of to the world, with musical ambiences gaining prominence and an unexpected space, as in “Las Cadenas” – where electronically trafficked voices draw strict sound narratives – and the litanies recited are repeated over and over again, underlining the sensation of loss and the melancholy and anguished tone that runs throughout the record. “Ela vem, volta sempre, a depressão (she comes, she always comes back, the depression)”, as A. Pedro Ribeiro exhaustively repeats, abandoning himself to the fado of social inadaptation and affective needs that make him fall “no fundo do copo, no fundo do abismo (at the bottom of the glass, at the bottom of the abyss)” amongst rags of melody. And the apocalyptic visions or the warnings that “a coisa vai estoirar (things are going to blow)” are worthless, supported by a rhythmic crescendo of explosive plots, because the destiny is already set: “voltar, voltar sempre (come back, always come back)”. And how good is this return! At a time when Portuguese music mostly navigates a modernized national-songwriting disguised as pop, it’s a blessing to hear these Sereias and their disruptive chimera in the form of music, where creation is a vital and urgent impulse.
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Do Claro ao Breu is designed as an object of contrasts, integrating two antagonistic and independent compositions, as if they were a representation of day and of night. Side A, more luminous, is part of the work that the collective carried out with the dancer and choreographer José Artur Campos for the sound design of the short video dance Meia de Leite. A composition where the polyphony of voices, rich in atmospheres and landscapes, begins a dialogue with Eugénio de Andrade’s poetry. A universe of enchanting mists serving as a fabric for some of the most frequent images of Portuguese tradition: hands, fruits, seasons, connection to the earth and cycles. Side B turns us towards the dark and the nocturnal, spaces where fears and superstitions roam, on a journey around sinister and grotesque elements of traditional popular imagination. This composition results from the collaboration of Sopa de Pedra with the Porto collective Oficina Arara, where the proposal was to set to music texts inspired by popular superstitions that have now disappeared or are residual, more specifically some prayers, poems and blessings.
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Intricate hocketing, call and response, and layers of ostinati become the means with which COBRACORAL engenders their distinctive sonic texture: a latticework for the voice. While one voice may insist on a two-tone melodic fragment, another may occupy itself with the rhythmic spaces left unvoiced by the first, so that a harmonic base is constructed for the third to shimmer. COBRACORAL further explores the potential of the voice by using sound effects and gesture to amplify the aural experience, suggesting that the limits of the voice extend out into electric and corporeal realms. The movements of the body also modulate the sound, as does as an artificial echo, a delay or a pitch shift. A modern vocal trio, COBRACORAL is both electrified and electrifying.
Geometric patterns color the surface that makes up COBRACORAL, like the species of snakes from which they take their name. Each song develops its own breathing pattern: a communal rite focusing in on the movement of air, where motifs of inhalation and exhalation become systems that unfold time onto vocalized expression. A careful observation of the temporal passage of respiration, of its playful and life-sustaining dynamics, is their practice of communion. There is a common responsibility held in this spirited patchwork. Ritualistic chant, hypnagogic cycles, and contemporary vocal techniques shape the rhythmic, imagistic and narrative landscape that is COBRACORAL.
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Few things are left to chance when it comes to CZN, the percussion-heavy project where prodigy rhythm shamans Valentina Magaletti and João Pais Filipe converge along with producer Leon Marks. Although intuition does play an intricate part in their outputs, it is the result of years of training picking different directions in rhythmic patterns that plays the bigger role in their latest Commutator. The path is clear, but the options are not as narrow as the creative decisions to avoid: 4:4 and other obvious patterns are forbidden coordinates, as well as the traditional drum kit and its limitations.
By exploring the numerous possibilities enabled by two drums kits reimagined from scratch and an array of copper-zink-nickel gongs and cymbals forged by Pais Filipe (the reasoning behind the CZN name), the group creates trance-like pieces that defy circularity, and create enticing movements to defy boredom. The listener is dared to dance, rather than invited to do so, being guided through a series of accelerations, decelerations and dynamic narratives where drumming intertwines perfectly with the environments produced by Marks via dub and non-melodic elements.
Throughout the two pieces of Commutator, the rule becomes the avoidance of norm. Torpor, as well as the obvious, becomes the only real tendency to avoid. This long-play comes out as the symbiotic output of two percussionists who are akin despite having trailed such different paths, perfectly merged in ever-shifting electronic landscapes. It is a standalone document, valuable by itself and with a growing interest in a proper context.
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Maps establish a place, a world that we may or may not be part of, but which is known to some extent. There will always be a border, a limit, a place where things are unknown and where they can only be speculated.
Vozes Antenas Fragas, Montes' debut album, is a cartography divided into four parts by the duo formed by Kauê Gindri and Arianna Casellas. Together, they wind and unwind a disheveled skein of sounds through images drawn through mysterious city fogs mountain peaks that until they can be reached, live only in the land of desire.
Globetrotter record, Vozes Antenas Fragas arises from communal work, driven by confinement and inspired by the view of the mountains on the horizon that gave a name to the band. A synoptic picture where light, shadow and gestures dance. Four whirlwinds songs that reveal free choreographies of color, rhythm and timbre.
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Created in response to an invitation addressed by Musicbox to Lovers & Lollypops, this album records the collaborative creation of Septeto Interregional, composed of six musicians from different parts of the country, Arianna Casellas (Sereias), Mr. Gallini (Stone Dead), Rafael Ferreira (Glockenwise), Rodrigo Carvalho (Solar Corona), Violeta Azevedo (Savage Ohms) and Zezé Cordeiro (Equations), and a graphic designer, Serafim Mendes.
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Candor, control and kindness are characteristics of SamuelMartins Coelho’s second solo album, “Cura”. They also describe the symbiotic meeting between jazz, classical/contemporary and folk/country. The song titles elucidate the reconciliation with life in times of pandemic – “Healing”, “Breathing”, “Wind”, “Skin”, or “Earth” – and what you hear in them feels like the tension and the uncertainty of a musician who wants to go out and grow.
Samuel's career has – so far – gone through several projects and participations, whether as a musician or composer, in 2019 he expressed the desire to create in his own name and publish a solo album – “Partita Para Violino Solo” – with the instrument he led him to all this, the violin. Two years later, “Cura” is synonymous with growth and comfort, whether with the material side, the violin and guitar that accompanies it, or with what can be considered more spiritual, that of creation and self-realization as a composer.
Healing doesn’t have to be a heavy process. Search traces – confusion? – which appear designed in some themes, such as “Vento”, sound like dialogues between Samuel Martins Coelho and the listener and not internal searches. As if the alleys that the pandemic placed in all of our heads came out to communicate with each other. The sound communicates a plain of discomfort and anxiety but, eventually, it stops being just about the musician, who performs, and becomes about us, on this side. And, in the end, about everyone.
That is the wonder of sharing “Healing”. A continuous act of discovery and performance, between Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Max Richter and Jóhann Jóhannsson, in which the musician uses isolation and the coexistence – or lack thereof – of restrictions, to create a clear language that can be heard as community music. There is goodness and gentleness in all these sounds. In “Awakening”, the last song, Samuel Martins Coelho seems to want to say that the cure has finally come to an end. Perhaps for you, for us, it has only just begun.
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After the rubble found in the Esoteric Bazaar, that revealed the outline of an anarcho-religious ritual inspired by the teachings of darkwave post punk spiritists,Ata Saturna was found, with a blurred reading but which identifies 3 scientists (Francisco Lima, Raúl Mendiratta and José Miguel Silva) tasked with synthesizing a robotic figure, more conscious and sentient than his human contemporaries.
According to the first reports of those who had contact with Ata Saturna, the experimental scientists, apparently driven by sadistic intoxication, created an entity especially capable of encountering disillusionment. Anyone who has come across this being describes a new messiah, who brings new nihilists in simple and captivating melodies, constantly shouting that 'the apocalypse has already happened, destiny has been fulfilled, anarchy has been contained, tomorrow is not a promise, anxiety is perpetual, the sun never rises here.'
The ingenious invention, commissioned with the aim of addicting humans to their most basic contradictions, was tested confidentially and the results, now available to the world, show that the planet may have more empathetic constructions than its creators. The ideologues of Conferência Inferno believe that only a mirror in our dehumanization will humanize us and we will only be saved when every day is an ode to the god Saturn and slaves exchange places with their masters.
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Gustavo Costa is a musician and artist with countless talents. His work is guided by a constant exploration of the limits of listening. He had musical training from an early age, but his journey far transcends the boundaries of music. He’s a drummer, but also an instrument builder, creator of new sounds, sound sculptor, teacher, programmer and – we would say – a generous promoter of Portuguese contemporary music and sound art. All this without ever losing focus or pointing the lights in your direction.
Perhaps this is why, only now, after 30 years of intense connection with the musical universe, diverse collaborations and extraordinary creations, Gustavo decided to present his first solo album with the instrument that has accompanied him since he was a child – drums and percussions. Entropies and Mimetic Patterns is a surprising record, which gives us the sensation of patient, meticulous concentration, as if his entire trajectory had converged to it. To entropy, which represents disorder and randomness, Gustavo responds with patterns that link gesture and emotion and that provoke a feeling of presence, of closeness. He’s just a musician in front of his instrument, but the communion remains, as if once again, it was the share that guided his purposes.
It’s with this exploratory sensitivity that this album is made of, a personal record where Gustavo organizes chaos and percussive energy into complex and unexpected rhythms, a reflection of his particular sonic universe into which we are invited to enter.
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At the end of Vox Flora, Vox Fauna’s eight songs, Ece Canlı proves the ability to shorten distances between the most heavenly landscape and the harshest scenery. The Turkish artist – who currently lives in Porto – incorporates her voice in environments that seem contrasting on paper but that form harmony in the musical construction she gives them. The way Ece Canlı works with her voice advances in favor of a constant drive throughout Vox Flora, Vox Fauna.
She has created landscapes in other projects – Nooito, Live Low and Cobra’Coral –, solo, Ece Canlı insists and consistently repeats that it’s still possible to create unique narratives, working with ideas of extremes in the middle. That is, it’s constantly celebrating points that unite styles, seeking influences from traditional folk ideas/constructions, working them through an electronic-experimental prism and playing all of this with the sense of natural music, sounds that, instead of replicating nature, are demonstrations of landscapes, climates, experiences.
Through this sound structure, Ece Canlı brings the listener closer to her surroundings. The environments are a gateway, the voice – how you use it, how you create languages and create poetry without linguistic and formal boundaries – is the element that captures and redirects the sensations through these songs inhabited by the generosity and violence of human's relationship with nature. Nature as everything that is around and that changes and adapts.
Vox Flora, Vox Fauna avoids existing as an album of heaven and hell, of light and darkness, of opposites. It brings them closer, celebrates them, integrates them into crystal clear and lively songs. Ece Canlı's voice is an invitation for those on the other side – the listeners – to enter this world and be part of it.
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With five songs recorded remotely, before and during the pandemic, the Lisbon collective's album was not born as usual. It didn't start with unbridled improvisation and then was "regulated" in post-production, on the contrary, there was more improvisation in the mixing phase than in the first moments. Loops, percussion, basses, synthesizers, voices, guitars, traveled in cyberspace overlapping each other, without anyone feeling a lack of space or rushing. Singular circumstances adverse to the communion and anxiety that characterized the band's sound and even rock in other times, but which allowed for more individual freedoms. Proof of this, Kill Screen is the album with the "best sound" of all the Loosers' albums and with details, that the band once undervalued, receiving increased attention.
Kill Screen is an album from a time when it is not easy to process all the information and misinformation and instead of discussing politics we continually discuss whether the earth is flat, whether vaccines cause autism, whether racism and machismo exist, while we are living realities intangibles in dependence on tech giants and in front of screens.
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Following the rich tradition of experimentation in the field of Black Metal and surrounded by the aura of mystery and mystery that characterized the genre since its beginnings, Bríi elevates music with extreme contours to a whole new level. A mix of textures - atmospheric, electronic and traditional Brazilian sounds - transforms his debut in Entre Tudo que é Visto e Oculto into a kind of one-man magnum opus.
The coldness and rawness of the desolate sound contrasts, here, with the balance and naturalness of tropicalismo, in a tenuous, but precise balance between the cutting and dogmatic sound of metal, the richness of Brazilian percussion and the shattered and lost sounds of a any dance floor.
Entre Tudo que é Visto e Oculto is an album of refractory ideology, a multifaceted and liminal debut that balances the austere and the solemn, the passionate and the cold, traveling through long atmospheric landscapes, folk-inflected progressions and paths with tonitruating contours.
Four songs where the intense, heavy and opaque sound sits comfortably at the entrance of an almost dreamlike territory, in a kind of waiting game for the imminent entry of the most extreme reinforcements of the composition.
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In paranormal lore, Paisiel is, quote, “a guardian angel responsible for the seventh heavenly hall.” Rocket Recordings’ experimental duo Paisiel, meanwhile, contain a Pais – João Pais Filipe, Portuguese drummer and lynchpin of the country’s experimental music subculture – and an -iel: Julius Gabriel, German saxophonist relocated to Porto and, too, embedded in that scene. Which is to say that their chosen name is as specific and singular as the music they make together, as heard on their latest album ‘Unconscious Death Wishes’.
This latest work represents a progression from what was already forward-facing music. ‘Unconscious Death Wishes’ is a single 39-minute piece, laid down live in the studio and subject to minimal edits only (for the constraints of the LP format, plus some field recordings from Porto and Berlin mixed in at the piece’s intro and outro). Julius thinks of it as “instant composition” – improvised, but based on composed structures.
Though ‘Unconscious Death Wishes’ feels funereal and dungeon-bound as it emerges quietly from the undergrowth, together Paisiel evolve and build. Soon, we’re dealing with an array of percussion and wordless vocal exhortations – the latter Julius’ way of reacting to João’s drum performance. Stern avant-electro synths call to mind 1980s Cabaret Voltaire or even Muslimgauze, the late DIY electronic composer who Paisiel list as one of their foremost influences. Julius’ gloriously expansive saxophone playing is inspired by names such as Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Dewey Redman, while his bandmate is locked and loose in equal measure here: time-whisk João to a late 60s proto-Krautrock cafeteria jam, early 70s New York loft jazz happening or Brazilian street parade from whichever decade takes your fancy and this dude could hold his own / hold it down.
After the weird-party vibes have taken hold, the beats start to hit harder, more industrial almost; Julius sustains notes for longer durations and then, before you know it, everything’s spinning off into Chaos Central. Ecstasy remains detectable at the core of this music, but is all well? Paisiel play music to transcend such earthly concerns: ‘Unconscious Death Wishes’ is their way of evoking, in Julius’ words, “landscapes, shapes, colours, proportions and movements”.
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Mariano de Melo, aka Marian Sarine, is a multi-instrumentalist, active as the drummer/percussionist for DEAFKIDS, playing synths and percussions live with the electronic vanguard artist Felinto, and as a solo artist (under the moniker of Sarine).
The album is based in old and new themes, recorded in an old Brazilian organ from the 80's. By making use of a few arpeggio patterns (namely 'Jazz Rock' and '16 Beat'), in improvisational detours which take off from the juxtaposition of rhythmic ideas over such patterns, I use them as starting point to achieve other groove possibilities, incorporating the overlaid notes the organ adds as another improvisational element, in a kind of a self-jam. The record drives inspiration from several sources, such as Charanjit Singh's experiments on modernizing traditional North-Indian ragas to an electronic setting, as well as master organist/synth players from different parts of Africa, like Hailu Mergia, Mammane Sani and Hama.
The album also deals with the manipulation of limited resources, posed by the quarantine period, through a lo-fi perspective which takes into consideration the urgency and restriction that seep through the present moment.
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The result of a predestined collision course between two modern day forces of iconoclasm, ‘Faca De Fogo’ is a rhythmically driven journey into soundscapes mercurial, savage and disquieting. Here a Mancunian-birthed counter cultural sound collective and a Porto-based master of percussive divination join forces, resulting in mystical trance states and elemental epiphanies aplenty.
GNOD first met up with João Pais Filipe at the Milhoes De Festa event in Barcelos, initially intrigued by a gong he’d made in the shape of a skateboard which formed part of an exhibition. They were soon introduced, and a plan was formulated apparently of its own volition to work together, subsequently co-ordinated by the Porto-based label and promoters Lovers & Lollypops around a week spent by GNOD in Porto. Three days of rehearsals led to the basic structures that were explored at an incendiary show in the city, which were in turn subsequently recorded over four days in João’s metal workshop with minimal overdubbing, forming a powerful portrait of the sparks that flew and the fire they created.
Forged in a spirit of spontaneity and intuition, ‘Faca De Fogo’ wastes precisely zero time in manifesting this incendiary chemistry between these two explorers of mantras and repetitive revelation. Themed around the elements in thematic unity with the alchemical nature of João’s practice, it runs a gamut of improvisatory exploration from the eerie atmospherics that introduce ‘Faca De Terra’ via the polyrhythmic kraut-damaged mania of ‘Face De Ar’ to the shamanic and bleak Swans-esque clangour of the title track.
‘Faca De Fogo’ is a soundworld without barriers, a meeting of minds and mallets in which the duality at its core is subsumed into a singular force as primal as it is metaphysical.
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Duas Vozes is the solo debut album of Portuguese composer and artist Pedro Augusto. With six themes of non-operative music, whose sole purpose is to build a musical program that could be performed live without programming, Duas Vozes has a very frontal, lively and dynamic sound.
Written from two monophonic sequences of a modular synthesizer, it marks the beginning of a series of editions that will evolve from the initial object through the addition of new instruments. Visual music that physically results in a video-album-trip, where Pedro Augusto's music is deposited in the images created by Rafael Gonçalves.
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Riding Pânico - Homen Elefante by ragingplanet
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Drugs by Youthless
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#018 Alto! - See you in Hell Ron!
#017 Quit - Trains EP
#016 Feia Medronho - Pinta Natural
#015 The Astroboy - A Derrota da Engrenagem
#014 DOPO - For the Entrance of The Sun
#013 Lovers & Lollypops - 1 Ano de Bailarico
#012 Veados Com Fome - Veados Com Fome
#011 Frango + Dansse Damaje - Fuentezfuentezfuentez
#010 EYE8SOCCER - Total Fucking Drawkness
#009 Le Jonathan Reilly - The Singles
#008 Dead Man On Campus - CDR
#007 Green Machine - Themes for the Hidebounds
#006 Veados Com Fome - Lobster/Veados com Fome split
#005 Veados Com Fome - Vol.# 3
#004 Veados Com Fome - EP
#003 Sikhara + OvO - Split
#002 Fish & Sheep + Tropa Macaca - Para o Inferno com Eles
#001 Green Machine - Green Machine
Angélica Salvi, Ece Canli, João Pais Filipe and Pedro Augusto are four musicians and composers who have followed, in parallel, an important national and international path in the fields of experimental music, electronics and sound research. All with recently released albums, the connections they have established multiply between collaborations and co-editions but never in this close way.
In the middle of the pandemic winter, while preparing a first and last performance as a group, the ad hoc quartet took advantage of the time of those times to record an album that is both frugal and powerful, the epitome of what could certainly be called a magnetic trance with a work of original composition of voice, percussion, harp and synthesizers.
Since 2010, Milhões de Festa has been taking place in Barcelos (Portugal), the point from which, in more than ten years of history, it build a reputation of being one of the most country's most referential musical event, a space for discovery and encounter with new musical movements and a scenery for dozens of national premieres and memorable concerts. Driven by its eclecticism, Milhões de Festa proposes, annually, a diverse line up composed by national and international artists, a stage that is also a swimming pool, a “taina” are that incorporates the DNA of the region where it operates crossing music and food, as well as a set of musical and cultural proposals that in the city's public spaces, in an attempt to promote a close connection between the festival and Barcelos.
It was also around Milhões de Festa that a movement of musical creation was born, described by some as the “Barcelos scene”. A movement guided by the appearance of a diverse group of new bands and an environment of collaborative musical creation that remains alive until today.
(2014-Presente) Tremor is an festival-experience that aims to implement a creative platform in a constant dialogue with the territory and the local community of the Azores, with particular attention to the island of São Miguel, the place where it takes place annually. With music as its ignition point, Tremor integrates a set of concerts that, over five days, occupies theaters, commercial spaces and touristic locations. The hallmarks of the festival are Tremor na Estufa, surprise concerts that are often held in natural and outdoor spaces, and Tremor Todo-o-Terreno, hikes that are accompanied with original and site-specific soundtracks, created to provide a plastic and sonic experience for a specific trail and that culminate in a live presentation surrounded by nature.
Committed to its work with the Azorean community, Tremor has been intensifying, since 2014, its residency program, with a wide range of exclusive creations that relate music to the territory, that activate collaborative creation with artists from the Azores and that involve different communities in the production of unique shows. Examples of this are the regular collaboration with the Rabo de Peixe School of Music and the São Miguel Deaf Association, among others.
The 20 XX Vinte is an itinerant festival that offers an authentic music marathon and non-stop exhibitions. So far five editions were held in different spaces in Porto, Guimarães and Lisbon integrated with some of the initiatives of the most recent European capitals of culture in the country. 20 XX Vinte aims to be an exercise of "State of Art" for contemporary Portuguese culture .
Festival anual organizado em Serralves que conta com várias atrações artísticas desde a arte performativa, música e artes plásticas.
No ambiente único do Parque de Serralves, a Festa do Outono marca a chegada da nova estação e celebra a época das colheitas, o reavivar de antigas tradições e costumes, demonstra saberes e práticas ancestrais ligadas à tradição rural, revividos no contexto contemporâneo de Arte e Paisagem que é Serralves.
Os públicos de Serralves podem visitar o Parque à noite nos meses de julho e agosto e conhecer, ou revisitar, percursos, árvores e elementos construídos icónicos, decorativamente iluminados, que transformam o ambiente noturno do Parque numa experiência única de magia e luz.
Ponte Party People had four editions (2010, 2011, 2012 and 2015 and 2016) and took place in Braga (Portugal). Held in one of the lungs of the city, Parque da Ponte, the event was one of the first in the region to present a line up totally composed of emerging Portuguese music.
Les Siestes Électroniques is a summer event held annually in France that, in 2018, started to have a Portuguese edition in Coimbra. Focusing mainly on electronic music, the event features a line-up of emerging artists targeting not only fans of the genre, but also professionals working in this field. The fact that it takes place outdoors and has free admission makes Les Siestes Électroniques a rare event in the European festival scene.
Based in Mondim de Basto (Portugal), Salto da Graça is an event that brings together music and adventure, developing initiatives that, in dialogue with nature, design new ways to discover the local territory and propose a new relationship between live music and natural environment. Canoeing, paragliding, off-road circuits, hiking, cycling and canyoning are some of the sporting activities that are complemented by soundtracks and exclusive concerts.
GRÓIA is the acronym for the editorial section of VICE “Guimarães Rocka-Ó-Ió-Ai” and was born from a partnership between VICE and 2012 Guimarães European Capital of Culture. The festival organized concerts of Portuguese bands such as PAUS, Allen Halloween and Moullinex + Xinobi.
Rua de São Vitor, 143-A
4000-515 Porto,
Portugal