Childhood friends, Marta Torrella and Helena Ros have long known that something very special happens when they join their voices. But it was only after having been in a choir, from which they brought a precious intimacy with sacred, renaissance, baroque, and romantic music, that they realized how much their various musical interests could morph into a language of their own. Tarta Relena are driven by extreme curiosity to sing in tune with these distant classical references, as well as with traditional music from various Mediterranean regions. On their acclaimed debut album, Fiat Lux, to their voices, the absolute centre of their music, electronic details were added, that spread out like a rug for their intertwined melodies. The uniqueness of this duo led to the creation of a genre of their own that they call “folk tronadet [ruined or spoiled, in Catalan]” or “progressive Gregorian”. As enigmatic as it is fascinating.

Image: © Duna Vallès i Clàudia Torrents

The voice is at the centre of Verde Prato. A solo project by Ana Arsuaga, Verde Prato is one of the most original and charming musical revisitations of the oral tradition of the Basque Country and brings together, as if it had always been like this, popular songs and liturgical songs, melodies heard from distant ancestors in time, and electronic music that is contemporary without making a manifesto of it. Choosing Euskera as the language for her creation, Arsuaga sings in a breath of voice that reminds us of Hope Sandoval (of Mazzy Star) and Nico (Velvet Underground), and fills her songs with stories made from the universal simplicity of popular culture. Kondaira (2021), the debut album, follows in the footsteps of a boy who leaves his village for the city, each song mirroring the different looks of those who see him passing by. A precious narrative about exodus and migrations, but also about the ability to empathize and what each one projects onto the lives of others. All wrapped up in touching and intimate songs.

Image: © Maria Muriedas

Imagining unexpected encounters is one of the most creative and rewarding things possible in music. By inventing a meeting place between the popular songbook of Beira Baixa and a reinterpretation shaped by Berlin downtempo electronica, Tempura the Purple Boy and Edgar Valente create the peculiar and fascinating duo Bandua. The album born from this partnership provides one of the most original musical journeys recently created in Portugal, as if we were entering a new fictionalized tradition and being reminded that places are transformed by people and by the way they renew local customs and folklore. Based on poems and sounds from Beira (with pagan and Moorish influences), Tempura and Edgar Valente (singer of the group Criatura) let the roots grow into in simultaneously familiar and strange sounds, in a “profoundly free and contemporary music”, as they called it in the Público newspaper, which questions “notions of territory, spirituality and community”.

Voices and tambourines seems like a combination destined to replicate rural and ancestral music, linked to some telluric essentiality. But in the case of Tanxugueiras, this starting point does not deprive them of, bringing slices of electronic music, rock and contemporary pop to their tunes, while maintaining a deep relationship with Galician musical roots. They say that they are the protagonists of a (r) evolution of traditional music from Galicia, and that is exactly what they put on the records and on the stages where they perform: a tradition that takes the melodies and rhythms inherited from the elders and makes them evolve into a sound that, almost by accident, becomes revolutionary. Especially because, in addition to the connection to urban trends, the reinterpretation of traditional coplas by the three Tanxugueiras – who’s recording debut was in 2018 – also points to themes around the absence of borders and female empowerment. Always with celebration on the horizon – as this traditional culture is transported to a unique dance floor.

Image: © Rocío Cibes