With many ideas, many fronts, and a wealth of talent to spare, Pedro Alves Sousa created Má Estrela to bring some of his fascinations to life, hand in hand with some musician friends. Pedro Alves Sousa on saxophone, Bruno Silva and Simão Simões on electronics, Gabriel Ferrandini on drums, and Bruna de Moura on electric bass. Má Estrela began as Pedro Alves Sousa’s idea to combine jazz and different elements of electronic music and suddenly expanded thanks to the different affinities of the various members (in the past, Miguel Abras played bass in the project).
After the eponymous album released in 2022 by Shhpuma, “Tornada” is the next chapter, this time on the multifaceted Discrepant, probably the Portuguese label most aligned, in the last decade, with releasing, among other things, fringe music made in Portugal. “Tornada” is in line with what we have heard in the past, deepening and reviving the ideas of the debut album and, above all, making everything more hybrid and, at the same time, more condensed with the aim of turning this sound into something unified, that is, not a set of ideas, but a single idea, where all the musicians’ sensations converge into a sound wave, without a language, but languages.
At times, one feels the presence of Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound spirit and the brilliance of that mutant sound that populated both post-punk and no wave and everything that derived from it. It coexists with this past, but does not depend on it to formalize itself. In fact, it thinks more about the weight with which some dance music—footwork, for example—can infect what Má Estrela intends to build. In constant flow, unaware of what it means to be adrift and certain that what they produce is close to perfection. Whether for dancing or not. There is something contagious about Má Estrela.
AS

With Azorean roots and based in Almada, Carolina Miragaia is a multidisciplinary artist whose primary form of expression is music.
From indie roots and membership in an indie rock band to the creation of experimental videos on cassette, and even acting in films, music production and composition have always accompanied the artist’s different interests and means of artistic expression. With a special interest in sound exploration in DAWs and the combination of electronics with musical instruments, her compositions exist somewhere between euphoric electronic dreams with a pop touch and a deconstructed emotional feel, which in turn can be perpetuated in the strings of a guitar, a metamorphosing voice, or resonant water bubbles.