Field Notes – Porto, The Mountains, and Human Crossings my new post on The Polymath site https://www.thepolymathisme.com/ is a lived note on Porto, exhibitions, transport hubs, mountains, symbolic conversations, creativity, and the unexpected human crossings that open new possibilities, and of how, often, the path appears afterwards. It can be read here.
My radio show Amazing Songs & Other Delights #95 – edition was broadcasted Monday 20th and 27th April, 2026, 3-4pm (London time) on Yé Yé Radio: yeyeradio.com and is now available on mixcloud.
Amazing Songs & Other Delights #95 – The Of Light & Gentleness edition is, as the title says, a programme that mostly revolves around light in different ways, and gentleness. You can read more about the show here.
Tracklist:
01: José Gonzalez – The Light
02: The New Pornographers – Pure Sticker Shock too
03: Francisco Fontes – Copiloto
04: Laurie Shaw – Chimney Breast
05: Kevin Morby – Badlands
06: Stone Dead – Plasticine
07: Bruce Springsteen – Rainy Night In Soho
08: Tinariwen – Imidiwan Takyadam feat. José Gonzalez
09: Butler-Black-Grant – Not Alone
10: The Lemon Twigs – I Just Can’t Get Over Losing You
11: Michael Weston King – Nothing Can Hurt Me Anymore
12: Red Sun Atacama – Sundown
13: Hanemoon – We Didn’t Know
14: Baby Suicida – Se Me Deixares, Eu Digo
15: The Dharma Chain – Clockwork
16: Special Friend – Isolation
All previous shows on mixcloud:
All previous shows on mixcloud:
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
We have been attending Wave-Gotik-Treffen, in Leipzig, since 2019 – minus the pandemic years – and 2026 is no exception.
As usual, Wave-Gotik-Treffen will be captured through the lens of Gustavo Hochman this year supported by image editor Milena Katzman.
Wave-Gotik-Treffen is the world’s largest gothic festival. It also includes Punk, Rivethead, Romanticism, Steampunk, Victoriana and other alternative and subcultures.
Our previous years’ full photologs.
My radio show Amazing Songs & Other Delights #96 – The We’re Still In Spring edition is broadcasted Monday 18th and 25th May, 3-4pm (London time) on Yé Yé Radio: yeyeradio.com to (or on the app).
There’s seventeen songs of different genres and time periods. By new bands and longs established ones. Some of the songs aren’t an obvious Spring choice, but they make sense to me in springtime.
The programme goes from a Spring song for children, The Kiboomers – Ladybugs Fly, to fado with Rita Braga’s tropical interpretation of Amália Rodrigues and Don Byas’ Rua do Capelão.
There’s space for indie songs, Again and Again and Again by Silly Boy Blue, Sun It Rises by Fleet Floxes, Stranger Baby by Gifthorse or Whole Again by Saint Sappho. Along Schubert’s Frühlingsglaube sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Test Department with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir singing Take Me Home.
The heavy weights contingent includes Taylor Swift, The Beatles, The Avett Brothers, and The Kinks.
And that’s not all.
Tracklist:
01: The Kiboomers – Ladybugs Fly
02: Taylor Swift – invisible string
03: The Kind Hills – Dance, Dance, Dance
04: Silly Boy Blue – Again and Again and Again
05: Saint Etienne – Who Do You Think You Are
06: Belle & Sebastian – Seeing Other People
07: The Beach Boys – Spring Vacation
08: Fleet Floxes – Sun It Rises
09: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sings
Schubert’s Frühlingsglaube, D. 686
10: Gifthorse – Stranger Baby
11: The Beatles – Octopus Garden (Remastered 2009)
12: Dean & Britta – Eyes In My Smoke
13: The Avett Brothers – A Fathers First Spring
14: Saint Sappho – Whole Again
15: Test Department with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir – Take Me Home
16: The Kinks – Sunny Afternoon
17: Rita Braga – Rua do Capelão
All previous shows on mixcloud:
Yé Yé Radio mixcloud|
Mondo Bizarre Magazine mixcloud
words: Paulo Carmona (freely translated by Raquel Pinheiro)
photos: Vítor Neves
Novos Românticos
A punch to the gut of the patriots. That’s what it is.
Any self-respecting lusitano, with a clear sense of their country’s history, recent or otherwise, will feel the almost unbearable weight of the stark, unvarnished reality served up by Novos Românticos. The silver platter is the sound, let that be clear.
This isn’t just music, it isn’t just musical aesthetics. It’s intervention, it’s agony, it’s the near-psychotic despair of someone who feels the weight of Portugalidade. Someone disillusioned with an Abril that seems ever more distant, with fewer and fewer reasons for pride.
David Félix is the man on duty, presenting himself to the audience as a kind of modern-day guru, fully prepared to press on the wound until it bleeds.
He carries an intrinsic ability to command attention: monochord vocal delivery, the sinuous movement of his body to the measured pulse of an electronic post-punk, hypnotic, corrosive, built on pre-recorded loops of guitar, drums, bass, keyboards, and samplers. He drifts across the stage, almost unsteady, faintly lascivious, but the message lands. That seems to be what drives them, and they achieve it with precision.
They performed material from across their repertoire, with a strong focus on their full-length work, Criptopátria. Worth highlighting are Pátria, Mesa Posta, and a very original version of the iconic Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart.
Bastonada
Bastonada closed the night, delivering verbal and musical blows with their interventionist Electro Punk, edged with rap. It’s pure energy from beginning to end, without a moment’s respite.
They’re young, intense, sharp, and they fire off their songs as if the world were ending tomorrow.
The instruments are always front and centre, and their masked vocalist is a force of nature.
The insolent anger of their youth, combined with the level of competence in their instrumentation, points to a project with real substance and a great deal still to give. It will be interesting to watch.
Concert clips and photo galleries on our Instagram
words: Telma Mota (freely translated by Raquel Pinheiro)
photos: Telma Mota
On 16 April, it was a ‘Happy Day’ at the Teatro Aveirense, with the funeral march of PAUS.
Having announced their end, the band made their fourth appearance of the year in Aveiro with impact and a certain sense of occasion.
They presented their final album in full, in an uninterrupted 30-minute crescendo. As they have accustomed us, this work entitled Enterro is marked by intense, hypnotic and innovative pieces that combine old-school experimental rock sounds, with complex and repetitive rhythms, with touches of indie vocal lines and the psychedelic textures of post-rock.
However, at this stage, arguably more refined and mature, they decided to stop and die in a florid and controlled manner, celebrating their own funeral with a tour that will symbolically end on 19 November 2026, the date on which they began their journey 18 years ago.
In a relaxed register, they made a few pauses at the beginning and end of the concert, between better-known older songs, in some way justifying that it is far more interesting to die and bury PAUS with dignity than to pass away in a disordered manner.
Happily for me, as I prefer the band’s earlier phase, more visceral, raw and unrestrained, PAUS opened this concert with Mudo e Surdo and closed with Pelo Pulso, both from their first EP É uma Água
They said goodbye in style, with the intense rhythm of the Siamese drum set played by Quim Albergaria and Hélio Morais, and the striking sounds of Makoto’s bass and Fábio Jevelim’s keyboard. I stood there, clenched my teeth and tapped my foot, wishing only to be somewhere more suited to dancing and exorcising my demons. It is not often one is invited by the dead to their own funeral, but for those present it was certainly a smiling experience.
And they were PAUS. Fare thee well.
Photo gallery on our Instagram Instagram
My radio show Amazing Songs & Other Delights #95 – edition is broadcasted Monday 20th and 27th 3-4pm (London time) on Yé Yé Radio: yeyeradio.com (or on the app).
Amazing Songs & Other Delights #95 – The Of Light & Gentleness edition is, as the title says, a programme that mostly revolves around light in different ways, and gentleness.
There’s grief, there’s groove, there’s dust, but the tone is mostly gentle and luminous. Even when the lyrics subject is heavier.
Tracklist:
01: José Gonzalez – The Light
02: The New Pornographers – Pure Sticker Shock
03: Francisco Fontes – Copiloto
04: Laurie Shaw – Chimney Breast
05: Kevin Morby – Badlands
06: Stone Dead – Plasticine
07: Bruce Springsteen – Rainy Night In Soho
08: Tinariwen – Imidiwan Takyadam feat. José Gonzalez
09: Butler-Black-Grant – Not Alone
10: The Lemon Twigs – I Just Can’t Get Over Losing You
11: Michael Weston King – Nothing Can Hurt Me Anymore
12: Red Sun Atacama – Sundown
13: Hanemoon – We Didn’t Know
14: Baby Suicida – Se Me Deixares, Eu Digo
15: The Dharma Chain – Clockwork
16: Special Friend – Isolation
All previous shows on mixcloud:
Yé Yé Radio mixcloud/ | Mondo Bizarre Magazine mixcloud
My radio programme Amazing Songs & Other Delights #70 – The True Love Edition has a repeat Monday 6 & 13, 3-4pm (London time) on Yé Yé Radio: yeyeradio.com (or on the app).You can read about the programme here.
Tracklist:
01: Jane’s Addiction – True Love
02: A 90s new man called Stan – Sushi feat. Adamski
03: Anthony Moore – Earthbound Misfit
04: Black Toska – Three Silver Nails
05: Cosmic Room 99 – E Corp
06: Fernando Triste – Escuro
07: Franz Ferdinand – Audacious
08: Good Sad Happy – Shaded Tree
09: Jonas – Bato À Porta
10: Kingbird – There Were Things That Needed Forgiven
11: Laurie Anderson – Road to Mandalay
12: Primal Scream – Love Insurrection
13: Terry Gross – Sales Pitch
14: The Heavy Heavy – Feel
15: Tindersticks – Always a Stranger
16: Virgem Suta – Amor Ao Avesso
17: Daniel Johnston – True Love Will Find You In The End
All shows on mixcloud: Yé Yé Radio mixcloud | Mondo Bizarre Magazine mixcloud
My radio show Amazing Songs & Other Delights #94 – Of Art & Image edition is now available on mixcloud.
Of Art & Image edition has 15 songs that refer to art, artists, mostly painters, and image, both still and motion. You can read more about the programme here.
Tracklist
01: Don McLean – Vincent
02: Manic Street Preachers – Interiors (Song for Willem de Kooning)
03: Death Cab for Cutie – Photobooth
04: The Passions – I’m in Love With a German Film Star
05: John Cale – Magritte
06: Modern Lovers – Pablo Picasso
07: David Bowie – Andy Warhol
08: Bauhaus – Bela Lugosi’s Dead
09: Duran Duran – Girls On Film
10: The Kinks – Picture Book
11: Spoon – I Turn My Camera On
12: Paul Simon – Kodachrome
13: Dire Straits – In the Gallery
14: John Mayer – 3×5
15: Manic Street Preachers – Kevin Carter
All previous shows on mixcloud:
Yé Yé Radio mixcloud/ | Mondo Bizarre Magazine mixcloud
Mondo Bizarre Magazine 