Bem-vindo to SQUARE, Portugal’s new music festival for the curious

From its pace to its pastéis, there’s a lot to fall in love with; but with many international touring acts seeming to sidestep the city for a quick stop in Lisbon, it felt hard at first to find much live music beyond the touristic yet perfectly pleasant experience of port wine and fado. After a couple of weeks scratching at the surface of its azulejo tiled streets, there was a strong DIY underground and experimental scene to be found, with a collective called Lovers & Lollypops at its heart.

Be it bossa nova shows, smoky techno parties or ambient music sessions for dogs (yes, really), the label-promoter-agency group seemed to have their name on every poster. Internationally, they are best known as the creators of Tremor, a highly ambitious festival on The Azores that, despite yearly plaudits from the press, manages to keep an “If you know, you know” kind of ethos.

Back on the mainland, about 30 miles north of Porto, are the neighbouring towns of Braga, Guimarães, Barcelos and Vila Nova de Famalicão, where many of the collective and the crowds that attend their events are originally from. At the end of January, all four of these places played host to SQUARE festival, Lovers & Lollypops’ next great project and a radical format that showcases not just national and global talent, but the variety of creative spaces – or spaces that can be used creatively – within the region, within their home.

Here’s how it works. This year Braga won the title of Portuguese Capital of Culture, and as the namesake of the district, serves as the festival’s base. On each of the four full days of the festival, after a few panels and lunch, a coach departs to the satellite sites, with festival go-ers following an itinerary that takes them around each town. It’s a setup that takes a bit of getting used to, something like a school trip but with loud music and lots of Super Bock. But it works, with the journeys home especially lively and convivial with passengers discussing their favourite finds via a medley of languages. Admittedly, the crowds are very industry and delegate heavy – to be expected on the festival’s launch – but with tickets costing only €50, including all travel, venue access and two meals a day, this creative crash course of the Braga district is a true bargain.

“The region where we are based is rich and vibrant in terms of cultural production,” explains Lovers & Lollypops’ Creative Director Marcio Laranjeira, “but lacks the strength to keep these amazing people living in the region. Most of the talent goes to Lisbon or outside of the country. We believe that this happens because the territory doesn't show its full potential sometimes, and we feel that if we open our borders and target a worldwide focus, we can help create this idea of a territory that creates loads of talent, but can also be a place that hosts and keeps this talent and they can choose to live and work here.

“So we envisioned these four cities as a place where people from the continents bathed by the Atlantic, with some of whom we already have strong bonds with, would be a good common ground to develop a place for people to meet and share. In the end we tried to add diverse and wider creativity to a region that already has roots as a creative developer.”

If you connect Braga, Barcelos, Famalicão and Guimarães on a map, they form the shape that gives the festival its name, but it’s more revealing that it’s a square with a definitive leftward slant. At both its best and its weaker moments, the curation of SQUARE is resolutely left-field, with each performance leaving the head tilted to the side with a kind of huh! impression. On Thursday afternoon in Barcelos – a quiet town set above the surging Cávado River and peppered with churches and snack bars selling bifana sandwiches and 90 cent glasses of vinho verde – comes an early highlight. A coach drops us off in the middle of the town’s open air market, the biggest in Portugal, where traders sell everything from swollen fruits and roasted chestnuts to knock-off trainers and colourful miniatures of the famed Rooster of Barcelos you might recognise from the Nandos logo. In the middle of it are a three piece from Amsterdam, Housepainters, whose thumping drum pads, wavy synths and loud, dubby bass commands the attention of elderly locals walking their dogs. Their bemused expressions are priceless, and it’s clear this kind of thing isn’t usual fare, but something about the band’s 80s retro sound and vintage garb feels fitting among the nostalgia that European markets such as these seem to trade.

Some of the challenging moments in the programme are more enriching than others. Colombian surrealist Julián Mayorga is just about the most bonkers musical act I might ever have witnessed, as he flits between instruments with a four-armed suit and sings about crunching on the bones of the rich like a rat. “No te comas las blanquísimas mofetas” makes the Vaticano, where many of the Lovers & Lollypops crew first partied as youths, feel like a clown house. In a rainy Guimarães, in a tunnel beneath a theatre, the spasmic drums and oscillating samples of Glasgow’s Comfort reverberate between the arches walls into a frenzy. These punchy, glitchy instrumentals normally serve as a vessel for frontwoman Natalie Mghee’s sharp honesty about the trans experience, and though some of its clarity is lost in the acoustics, this early performance sets a galvanising bar arguably matched only by ||ALA|MEDA|| three days later. While Comfort play to an audience just beginning to warm up on the first day, the Polish fusion group are one of the final bands of the festival, playing to a crowd hazy and haggard from 4AM finishes and 20K step counts, but their unpredictable blend of busy batida rhythms and shimmering post-rock atmospherics are a guiding hand through the dancefloor.

At a different dynamic, Arianna Casellas Y Kauê’s layering of percussive wood blocks and vocals that flit from sweet falsetto to pained wails begins to feel gruelling after 30 minutes, but even without understanding Spanish or Portuguese (the pair are from Venezuela and Brazil respectively), there is a palpable wistfulness to songs such as “Campanas” that is candid and moving.

Other moments don’t have the same pay-off. Skanderani are a Galician band who open the festival, performing with a questionable use of ethnic headdresses in front of an even more questionable backdrop of animations from a certain era that Disney prefers to forget about. Their take on the world psychedelia sound feels a little too basic or derivative to do them any favours. Guimarães’ own Unsafe Space Garden are another troupe of cosmic oddballs, and though their well-polished and playful set might be more enjoyable at another time, songs like ‘Tremendous Comprehension’ feel like a grating jumble of word soup at midnight.

In any case, the breadth of the programme is staggering and joyfully unpredictable. The curational theme of “Mapping The Atlantic” has a big part to play in this, with the festival inviting other showcase festivals, such as Sevilla’s Monkey Week or Rio de Janeiro’s Novas Frequências, to select acts to spotlight. “We started to narrow down with the people we know that live, work and have the same vision as us towards how to work with music and art,” says Laranjeira. “This vision is very simple, we wanted to invite people that we know that really care about the music and the artist when they do their work. So we invited 25 partners that we know that have the history and guts to bet on and develop new music and new artists, that take risks and that would understand what we want to do here, to create a place that celebrates music in all is forms and tries to create a context where curious people would find new and exciting art. This was a new way for us to work, with these 25 curators that we gave carte blanche to choose the artists that they felt that should be part of this, we ended up with a line-up done by many hands, and we believe that this diversity is one of the highest of this event.”

The Atlantic is obviously a sweeping portion of the world map, so maybe at times the theme feels a touch tenuous; the addition of Uganda’s Nyege Nyege or Slovakia’s Sharpe organisations is great, but these aren’t exactly Atlantic countries. But more importantly to Laranjeira’s point, it is clear from their artists’ performances and the conversations in between them that these curators all share a daring and DIY ethos, and it feels inspiring to be amongst them in one, or rather four, place(s).

That said, two of the festival’s shining performances come from a couple of Atlantic voices picked by SQUARE themselves. Júlia Colom reimagines traditional Mallorcan folk styles and songs – tonadas – with shifting and modern iterations, as the strum of nylon string guitars give way to heavy bass thuds on “Camí amunt.”

As Verde Prato, Ana Arsuaga sings almost exclusively in her mother tongue of Euskara, swirling above minimalist keys and analogue pops, clicks and beats that spotlight her Basque folk tales. Something about the sparing use of instrumentation, the unsharpened edge of her lyric delivery and the coy confidence with which she slowly shifts around the stage seems to magnify the soloness of her act. It gives the impression that we’re not really there, which is somehow fitting for a language isolate such as Basque, and only reinforced when Arsuaga closes her set on the a cappella “Haurraren kanta” away from the microphone.

Words are of course only a part of a musical language, and with the Atlantic reaching the shores of Latin America and West Africa, it’s natural that the dembow beat of reggaeton and Afrobeats dominates a lot of the parties – not least De Schuurman’s all-out energetic mix in an old cinema foyer. Sets such as these are a hit, though there are more surprises to be found from Moroccan DJ Guedra Guedra or Bolivian-born Belgian Susobrino, who both use the rhythm more inventively over the course of their performances.

The disused cinema that hosts these afterparties is just one example of SQUARE’s ability to breathe new life into spaces, and with Braga set to enjoy more attention this year as a Capital of Culture, Lovers & Lollypops have set the bar high in January. The festival’s multi-city format and sweeping curational approach will not be for everyone, and there is a niggling worry as to whether a logistical feat will be so easy in the coming years with some industry drop-off and reduced funding from the Braga City Council. But SQUARE is a festival for the curious, and Lovers & Lollypops know well that you can’t subvert the norms without a little risk, and the team seem hopeful. On the closing night, when the programme is at its busiest, SQUARE is 15 tickets away from full capacity. “For a first edition of an event without a headliner,” Laranjeira says, “I believe that is a good statement for the future.”