August 2021 brought Passepartout Duo to Portugal. While in residence at De Liceiras 18, we played six concerts throughout the country in Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra, and Valbom. It was a fantastic introduction to a country with an exceptional music scene filled with passionate artists and musicians of every kind.

Our first week was spent in Lisbon, exploring the city and performing twice with Galeria Zé dos Bois at their Novo Negócio space. We also shared the concert with Sara Anjo who opened each of the two shows with an experimental dance performance.

After our week in Lisbon, we headed north to Porto for our residency with De Liceiras 18. The residency has somewhat of a reputation in the city: the building has passed between the hands of many local artists as early as the 90s, and even in its perpetually collapsing state, its managed to weather the years long enough for our arrival. We can attest that it’s still standing now, but perhaps not too much longer. The squater-ness of the place definitely added to its charm, and it served as a fantastic base for us to explore the city and perform around the country. Our first concert in Porto was for Sonoscopia’s No Noise Festival.

Sonoscopia is a fantastic organization and collective that creates strange instruments, performs forward thinking and adventurous music, and organizes residencies and events like the festival in which we participated. They had just moved to a new space in the city, and so we had this wonderful time in their garden sharing the stage with Ka Baird, Anthony Pateras, and Tracy Lisk. It felt so fresh to meet musicians in the Summer sun after so much time spent concertless pandemic. Not every city has an organization so spectacularly dedicated to contemporary music as Sonoscopia: they’re really doing amazing and important work and anyone visiting Porto should see one of their events if they can!

Our next concert this month was in Coimbra, a small city known for its university. The city itself is filled with traditions connected to student life, like the student run houses, a bit reminiscent of US fraternities, called repubbliche. Here, we were at Casa das Artes Bissaya Barreto, who gave us an opportunity to play in their fantastically beautiful garden that sits above the city. The two humongous palms definitely stole the show, but the warm atmosphere was elevated further by many friendly people. We shared the stage with Caucenus, a DJ and electronic musician who takes a very cerebral approach to dance music using tools he’s developed based on AI and Machine Learning.

Finally, toward the end of the month we were able to play twice more in the Porto area. First was CCOP run by Galeria do Sol, and the second was Luz e Vida. The first in another garden (albeit with more concrete), and the second inside an association a bit outside the center of the city in a town called Valbom. Our whole month in Portugal was filled with cherished experiences, meeting dozens of outstanding local artists, meeting musicians from around the world, catching some sun in an otherwise cold year, and tasting some delicious food. We cannot thank enough everyone here who welcomed us to play in their spaces and introduced us to their lives in such vibrant cities!