Ana Lua Caiano’s debut album melds rural Portuguese music traditions with layered vocals, synthesizers, insistent beats and field recordings.
Her music is visceral and tightly focused pulling from a rich mosaic of influences that includes traditional group singing, musique concrete, songwriters from Portugal’s 70’s revolutionary period and electronic icons like Bjork and Laurie Anderson.
Hailing from Lisbon’s fertile musical underground, Caiano’s music – and its international reception – are moving forward quickly. Her lauded recent performances at Eurosonic and Transmusicales (where she recorded a KEXP session) certainly attest to that, as do the laser sharp emotions and highly individual sonics of her much anticipated first album: Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado (I Shall Stay in This Square).
Silence can be the perfect way to sharpen the senses. To let the world in, to allow thoughts to come to the surface. For Lisbon’s Ana Lua Caiano, those empty spaces – when she’s walking or can’t sleep – are when the ideas creep in. They’re her time to create. She takes them and moulds them into the songs that have poured out of her over the last two years. Initially for a couple of EPs (Se Dançar É Só Depois / 2023 & Cheguei Tarde A Ontem / 2022) that made a name for her around Europe and the world, and now on her debut album for Glitterbeat.
It’s electronic music. Utterly contemporary. Pulsing, glitchy, atmospheric and beat driven but with roots deep in the traditional Portuguese music her parents listened to when she was a child. “They had a lot of cassettes that they’d play,” she recalls. “I loved to mimic and I’d imitate the singers. I took it in by osmosis, I suppose, and the elements are still there in what I do.”
That’s the foundation; everything else has grown and flowered out that. But music has always been part of the fabric of her life. There were the classical piano lessons Caiano took until she was 13, then the four years of study at a jazz music school. All of it was discovery, but it was only a start. “Jazz gave more freedom, but it still had rules. By then I was listening to artists like Björk and Portishead, who offered a different tonality. I started going to workshops, learning about musique concrète, group singing, whatever I could learn outside of jazz.”
