Mondo Bizarre Magazine Concert Reviews, Concerts

I’A’V – Lovers & Lollypops, Porto, 18.06.2026.

© Mondo Bizarre Magazine/Ricardo Silva

I’A’V – Lovers & Lollypops, Porto, 18.06.2026.

words: Paulo Carmona (edited by Raquel Pinheiro)
photos: Ricardo Silva

Everything seemed suited to the project’s sound. The atmosphere, the space, the audience, and the time of the show.

It was just after 7.45pm when I’A’V entered the venue to present one of the most original Portuguese projects I have heard in recent years.

They came to present their first work: Volatile Poem, and I want to begin with the instruments used: cello, transverse flute, samplers and voice.

The sonic world of this project, featuring Inês Malheiro, Arianna Casellas and Violeta Azevedo, brings us fresh, atmospheric, spiritual and soothing environments. They navigate calm waters of musical poetry, blended with soft colours and gentle breezes.

Very well prepared and perfectly coordinated with each other, they create a symbiosis of musicality, with richly crafted arrangements and beautifully explored silences where the music breathes and lives by itself. The vocalisations evoke the songs of sirens: calm and seductive.

At the end of the enchantment, I had the opportunity to speak with the members of the project, who shared with me that when they came together to create this work, they were aware that they were three people with different musical structures and distinct languages. It was through this fusion of experiences and life journeys that they naturally connected, creating their own identity.

Without pressure, without preconceived ideas. They allowed the music to flow naturally, and the project’s sound took shape.

A toast to symbiosis! It is from ideas and fearless experimentation that things like this emerge.

There’s a photo gallery on our Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/mondobizarremagazine/

© Mondo Bizarre Magazine/Ricardo Silva
Mondo Bizarre Magazine Concert Reviews, Concerts

Sean Nicholas Savage, Lovers & Lollypops, Porto, 18.05.2026.

© Mondo Bizarre Magazine/António Carvalho

words: António Carvalho (edited by Raquel Pinheiro)
photos: António Carvalho

Attending a concert by Canadian singer-songwriter Sean Nicholas Savage is like discovering a hidden gem. The modest stage of Lovers & Lollypops seemed too small for everything he delivered in just over an hour.

His exuberant presence, his larger-than-life poetry, his attention towards the audience, his virtuoso and expressive voice are just parts of a larger whole that is difficult to describe. His electronic pop, heavily indebted to the eighties, reveals itself as confessional, honest and with a dose of apparent naivety, where joy and melancholy, loss and gain, mystery and revelation, pleasure and pain coexist, sometimes within the same song.

Whether in ballads or upbeat music, the classic themes of love – the euphoria of passion, the discovery of the other, the broken hearts – are dominant and served in catchy and well-crafted melodies, like many of the pop classics. Sean’s excellent technical mastery of his voice, including a delightful falsetto, doesn’t take away any of the moment’s authenticity, as if he were pouring his heart out and offering it to the audience.It was almost impossible to take your eyes off this magnetic, barefoot figure.

Besides the privileged ones in the audience, Clara Phends on synthesizers and Max-Elie Laroche on electronic drums joined him in this brief, intimate journey. Sean covered a representative sample of his prolific discography, with some emphasis on his latest album The Knowing, a record he is very proud of, so he told me after the concert.

He even granted a request from the audience, performing half of Chin Chin, and finished with one of his favourites, the single It’s Happening. Thank you, beautiful freak!

There’s a photo gallery of the concert on our Instagram

© Mondo Bizarre Magazine/António Carvalho