Some people are born with an old man inside them. Not just any old man, but one with a tireless will to search and innovate that, as an old man, only has a vision broadened by memory and, by extension, tradition. Royal Bermuda embodies this kind of person or character. Made up of André Parafina and Diogo Esparteiro, they explore paths of Portuguese folklore through fado, but also the more recent imported blues through their guitars. This is what they delivered in “Sempiterna”, album that they edited in September in digital and CD, and that they now present live at Zé dos Bois.

“Sempiterna” runs throughout eleven songs always with those two guitars (sometimes there is percussion, as in “Nha Preta”). In the music there is a constant conversation between the instruments, as if they could only exist at the same time, in a fast and intense ball of ideas. The tradition occurs not only through the sound, what it sounds like, but through the constant imagery that haunts the songs. Freedom and bohemia, one thinks of a fado house, but also of libertinism in any road movie made in Portugal. In other words, this is where the innovative old man comes in. Royal Bermuda is less interested in the revisitation and more in the new that is born from this point of inspiration: tradition, nostalgia, the flowing regret of memory. They do this lightly, that is, passing on the feeling that this music is designed to be heard on a stage and in conviviality. Created to share and transmit, the eleven themes of “Sempiterna” are a journey through various points of Portuguese instrumental memory, summarizing in detail some of its various aspects, to be communicated and experienced in the noble act of the stage. It couldn’t be any other way, after all Royal Bermuda’s music travels from Carlos Paredes to Dead Combo and builds something with a horizon in the present. AS

A journey around the search for (re)discovery of a real character, in a city of apparent cosmopolitanism, of strange geographies, where the territories have itineraries and volumes deeply closed in on themselves. After two years of performance at ZDB in 2020, José Rego presents himself again with João Galvão as sound designer for an extra sensorial experience, where the presentation space is the main character, trying to take the spectator on an almost cinematographic journey in which the dialogue is built, with each one of us, in the reading of the signs that the vibrating guitar strings offer us. An unprecedented experience that resulted from a long and methodical process promising to be followed by the editing of the first compositions with release foreseen later this year.