Beautify Junkyards’ third album, released in 2018, is entitled The Invisible World Of Beautify Junkyards. It was also the first album, of three released to date, on the British label Ghost Box, home to Pye Corner Audio and Focus Group. This matters because, first, there is no great tradition in Portugal of creating music for imagined places—whether fantastic, fantasy, or purely psychedelic nostalgia—and, in the absence of such a tradition, one of two things happens: either it is thought of as an imported phenomenon (a tremendous mistake in this century) or as the brainchild of people who like to think of music that way, to listen to it that way: without natural boundaries. After all, this is music for imagined places.
Secondly, it matters because the idea of an “invisible world” perfectly translates the music of Beautify Junkyards. A pop-format soundtrack, where tropical psychedelia, library music, the electronics and sensibility of Broadcast, and a voracious appetite for the strange world—that of nostalgia, ghosts, hauntology, the occult—combine with the intention of not fitting into a format, that is, into something that can be seen. The invisible world is justified, as is the intention to keep it invisible. Something they did well on their following albums, Cosmorama (2021) and Nova (2024).
AS

April Marmara is the musical alter ego of Beatriz Diniz, a singer-songwriter born and based in Lisbon.
In fact, the city is an essential part of her music. Music that carries a stillness and, at the same time, a calm instability. An ambiguity present in someone who closely observes the passage of time, interacting in this process, not just watching.
Her second and upcoming LP, “Still Life,” will be released by Lay Down Recordings and is a deep dive into isolation, loneliness, the quality of human relationships, and, above all, one’s relationship with nature and their own place in this world. It is a definitive step forward from April Marmara’s debut work, “New Home” (2018), both spiritually and artistically.