Mary Ocher is part of a generation – born in the first half of the 1980s – for whom, without the warm back of privilege, breaking the waves of the underground is very difficult. With a lot of planning and sacrifice, she has made her life depend solely on music and her art. This sounds like a mass speech, except that today, more than in any decade in the recent past, these asymmetries are palpable and it’s increasingly difficult to make a living as an artist without a warm back. Ocher has experienced different realities throughout her childhood (she was born in Russia, later moved to Turkey, and now lives in Berlin) and was brought up with a mentality that is not virtuously anti-capitalist, but rather optimistic about finding alternatives. So that we look the other way, so that we don’t just accept the lifestyle they’re trying to push on us.

This matters because Mary Ocher’s albums are always accompanied by a manifesto/diary about what we should be thinking about: living, living decently. In other words, there’s no artist’s jargon, but intelligent manifestos of reality. Read, for example, the latest (it’s on her website) around ‘Your Guide To Revolution’, an album from 2024, where she confronts, without moralising, her life choices in opposition to those around her. She begins by saying that she’s the only underground artist she knows who wasn’t born of privilege. That’s not hard to believe. Just look around you in Portugal. This matters, again, because her music is made up of a thriving economy, in which the means always subsidise the ends, without any fat. Songs that move forward, with a powerful engine, in which art overlaps with music and envelops without embellishment. The layers that Ocher puts on all this are honest, not designed to hide something, but to reveal something. It needs some attention, because Ocher wants to be heard, she wants to be heard as an artist who is fully at work deconstructing this reality promoted by fictitious desires. The guide to the revolution is not new, it’s a whole discography. AS

Inspirados no espírito nostálgico da música portuguesa, com influências do Soul, R&B, e Jazz, MANILA são uma banda formada por, Gerard Torres (teclas), Ricardo Pedrosa (baixo), Carmo Braga da Costa (voz), João Serra (guitarra) e Zé Lobo da Costa (bateria).

Os diferentes backgrounds e inspirações de cada membro confluem numa música eclética e repleta de melodias que ficam na cabeça, apresentando uma proposta original de indie pop português.

MANILA são contadores de histórias sonoras. Com a sua música, querem-nos a viajar através do groove, flutuando entre temas que tocam no existencialismo, amor, solidão, e nas infinitas dicotomias da vida. “Domingo à tarde” é o seu EP de estreia.