portugal
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I’ll be one of the first to admit this: intriguing album designs draw me in. Even in the age of digital artwork, nothing quite says “listen to me” than a singular, creative, point of view. I mean, what else would explain how I stumbled upon Miguel Braga’s haunting nocturnal ambient jazz album, Ritual?
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Just more music for “in between seasons”. What else can you say to describe the latter-day work of, sadly, now defunct, Portuguese sophisticated pop group, Ban? As I put on their Mundo de Aventuras it’s not hard to have your mind race back to more naive times when certain love songs spoke to youthful measures…
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I hate giving you just a taste of anything but Né Ladeiras’s Corsaria has to serve as one today. Ambient and ethereal, Corsaria rightfully belongs in a certain pantheon of Portuguese music, much like the work of Zeca Afonso (and others), trying to bridge that gap between the moorless, Portuguese fado tradition and whatever new…
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How long ago was the Age Of Discovery? Six centuries ago, in 1418, the story of Portugal began under the leadership of Infante Dom Henrique, who through the captains João Gonçalves Zarco, Tristão Vaz Teixeira and Gonçalo Velho Cabral came on shore (either by necessity or choice) to the then unknown islands of Madeira and…
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This might sound like yet that same old story: Noted folkloric or jazz muso discovers drum machines, synths, and samplers, proceeds to turn into both a sweeping statement unlike anything else in their oeuvre/pisses old fans off. I can play Madlibs with my write-up for Joan Bibiloni’s For A Future Smile and substitute Lisboa-native Júlio…
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I always hate to say never, but I’ll wager that you’ll never find another giant of fado music quite like José “Zeca” Afonso. A massive influence in the cultural milieu that transformed Portugal from a closed-off fascist state into one striving to understand its colonialist role and work towards rectifying it through freedom of thought…
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There’s something perfect about our imperfect minds. Most of the thoughts we think are the best, most of the time, aren’t the product of an instant occurrence. I’d say the best ideas truly come from a combination of luck/accident plus human intuition. Sometimes we may not know that our answer, or thought, is correct, but we feel it…
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Fausto Bordalo Dias Now that I’ve shared the brilliance of Carlos Paredes and Zeca Afonso with y’all I have to tie the influence those two artists together had right? If ever there was a musical masterpiece that just screams with the unique sound and influence of Portugal its Vila Franca das Naves-native Fausto’s Por Este…
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Zeca – 1971 Today’s track of the day, “Coro da Primavera” (Springtime Chorus), comes from the supremely important Portuguese artist Jose “Zeca” Afonso. Born in 1929 in the port city of Aveiro, Portugal this fairly inconspicuous man would be the last person you’d think who would grown up and write such songs like “Grandola, Vila…
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Carlos Paredes – 1971 Imagine launching a revolution without even saying one word. That’s the revolution in sound and in history that Carlos Paredes from Coimbra, Portugal was able to achieve. Fado, the blues music of Portugal, has melodies and sentiment informed from hundreds of years of colonial rule. The further the naval empire stretched,…
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