The Brooklyn Rail

Tremor shakes up São Miguel, the largest of the Azorean islands, a Portuguese volcanic archipelago situated north of Cape Verde and the Canaries, on a virtually straight flightpath from Lisbon. Using a sea chart, it looks like it’s around a third of the way across the Atlantic, from Portugal to the Americas. The festival has been in existence since 2014, celebrating the stranger sides of rock and electronic music, with a sub-plot revolving around global folkloric sounds. Internationally established acts move sideways through a clutch of native Azorean artists, mostly performing in the two-stage Portas do Mar in Ponta Delgada, the island’s largest city.

It’s fucking cold here. Unlike the smaller island, Terceira, which your scribe explored in 2018, warmed and moist in October, this one seems to have a predilection for volatile conditions in the spring, though thankfully no earthquakes. Wind-lashed and slightly raining, São Miguel was nowhere near as heated as Marseille or Berlin, the earlier cities on your scribe’s March road-trawl. It does, however, boast excessive undulant greenery and appealingly-hued dwelling places.

What’s needed is some rockin’ six-hour indoor drone sounds, amply provided by the collective, Water Damage, from Austin, Texas, amped up to full power and emboldened further by high volume clarity. They played a couple of gigs, the first being a living installation at the Arquipélago Centro de Artes Contemporâneas, joined by the OMA (Azorean Modular Orchestra) for an ultra-extended improvisation. Actually, Water Damage mostly riffs and repeats, dragging rock ’n’ roll up a minimalist hill of persistent structural evolution. Their two drummers (with maracas) enforce an unrelenting groove pattern, heads nodding sideways, kits facing each other, backs erect, sticks bonded by shared beats, a working slog that never decreases its monomaniac drive. Water Damage has twinned guitars and basses, and three electrified violins (or instruments that are violin-based, two out of three being personally crafted, with only one of them a traditional old school version). The drone dips its wings one way, then the other, no landing envisioned.

The OMA have their own table to stage right, but sound mysteriously low in the mix, as if this only partially professional collective are feared as potential drain blockers. This is an empty black box gallery, so the audience mostly sit around the edges, treating the piece as an installation rather than a song, hoovering up the afternoon. It’s only during the last half hour that Water Damage eases off into abstraction, most of its members stretching out on the floor, spent, flexing their limbs into muscle-saving positions, ensuring and preserving the ability to play another set the following night.

In the quaint music school concert hall of Auditório Luís de Camões, the Water Damage crew played a set that was just under an hour long, markedly shifting into a compact stance, turning out another riff-and-repeat groover, violin equivalents droning, guitars chugging, clenched basses pumping out sinuous lines, and drudge drums locking foreheads again in a purposeful work-out pounce of simultaneous snare-cracking, bassy kick drums lending agile bounce. We should call this band the Velvet Quo.

The acoustics in this wood-loaded space are exceptional for ringing, buzzing, blasting monotony, at least on the surface, before we collectively tune into growing hums and resonances, maximizing by the minute, confidently rockin’ and easy-stridin’ to abandonment in a deeply alternative fashion. The bows saw, the band is condensed, compressed, compacted, crushed, curt, casual, curtailed, and all those other c-words. They had a magnified purpose when there was no six-hour stretch lying in wait before them. This is a greasy good-time spoonful for the cerebral number-counter. Your scribe sits on the aisle seat of the third row, perfectly enfolded by the thrang, zero earplugs allowed.

Another type of quake flooded the Portas do Mar venue, around midnight, as The Bug unleashed the physical weight of his dub reggae bass lines, slicing down to skeletal song-structures that vocalist Warrior Queen nimbly negotiated into some distantly evolved dancehall descent, as The Bug (aka Kevin Martin, now living in Brussels, and a veteran of extremity in rock, drone, ambient, industrial techno, etc.) emits skinny slivers of cut-up matter, truncated sharply to contrast with the ballast-load of low vibrations, almost under the human ear, banished to its gut. Bug-Queen haven’t altered their live sound much over the years, reserving any detours for their recorded output.

A day earlier, the Egyptian singer Abdullah Miniawy also revealed a different aspect. His higher profile electro-jazz-hop work with French producer Simo Cell is way more aggressive than the spiritual ascendance of this gig’s trio with a pair of closely harmonizing trombonists (Robinson Khoury and Jules Boittin). Miniawy vocalizes up to a very high and pure range, calling out to another mosque-reverb realm, the ‘bones answering with sympathetic choral tones, the results quite surprising to folks who’ve already heard his more nervy club-orientated songs and raps. Miniawy leaves the stage, arms aloft and waving, looking distressed, as the trombones play bell to bell, facing each other, the singer still heard from afar as he circles around outside the perimeter drapes.

Global vibrations came courtesy of La Familia Gitana (power flamenco from Spain) and Pedrinho Xalé (cheesed keyboards from Cape Verde), who looked back on his tunes from the 1980s, now revived by the Analog Africa label. At first he seemed a touch out-of-his-time, but then some of the more convoluted numbers began to prompt bodily complexity on the dance floor, purely joyous.

Arsenal Mikebe came from Uganda, three percussionists joined by electronics producer HHY, turned up multiple notches since their already powerful performance at Tallinn Music Week in 2023. Heavily hypnotic, their Afro-interlocking turned into a strobing mass of full-on rhythm assault, doubtless influenced by HHY.

A climax of the weird also landed from North America, with the Angine de Poitrine twosome, garbed in polka dot finery, a guitarist having an erect nose, a drummer with a drooping version, headgear towering in an unknown geometrical formation. The axe has guitar and bass beings conjoined, sandpapered together via fine woodwork, its masked master skimming out radically progged contortions. The Residents must surely have prompted them, but were these Quebecois oddities two-thirds of Rush, or all of the White Stripes or Lightning Bolt? Nay, they were emphatically themselves, nerd-ling across the full scope of prog-math rock, polka, reggae, and surely some unidentifiable new-clever genres. If they weren’t dressed so ridiculously, would the crowd lap up their avant-gardisms so eagerly? This pair are striving (and succeeding) for something marvelously new, despite conjuring up more comparisons than we’ll all see all year.