Back To Lisbon
I recently returned to Lisbon after the best part of six months away from home. Next month I celebrate the 10 year anniversary of my arrival in the city with two gigs: an all-nighter at LISA on the 24th, and then an exciting B2B at a morning party on the 27th (to be announced soon). Before then, you can find me at VIBRA this coming Saturday.
My first proper weekend back was a busy one as I try and reconnect with what’s going on here. Here’s what I got up to.
THURSDAY
Spiritland
As Telma’s official #1 Fan And Hype Man, my first stop on getting back to Lisbon was of course to go and see her play at the new Spiritland. I’ve never actually made it to the original Spiritland in London, so I can’t provide a comparison, but on first look the Spiritland in Lisbon is a pretty surreal experience. Inserted into a new, in fact decidedly unfinished, swanky hotel near Marquês de Pombal, the place is squirrelled away down three floors and along a corridor, so you walk past people’s rooms on the way there. (The music is clearly audible along this corridor so I wonder if those rooms come at a discount.) Once you’re in, you’re faced with a stunning, high-ceilinged, cork- and velvet-lined room with a central 360º bar, elegant stools, and a well-proportioned DJ booth with record shelves and a fancy rotary mixer I’d never seen before. The speakers look a bit like alien sex toys.
These speakers, combined with the subs suspended from the ceiling, produce very high quality sound. Unlike other ‘listening bars’ in Lisbon where it’s almost impossible to actually hear the music because of the din, here you really can listen. Telma was playing a mix of jazz, soul, RnB and chug and it all sounded fantastic. I sang along with gusto to ‘Do Right Woman, Do Right Man’. In shorts and a t-shirt, I felt seriously underdressed. Cocktails were 14 euros.
At one point Telma went off to pee and didn’t come back for so long that the (8 minute) track she was playing ran out. Slightly incredulous, I pressed ‘back’ and ‘play’ on the CDJ and waited for her to return and explain herself. She told me the toilets were miles away — that you had to take the lift down a floor and then go searching for them — but I still didn’t really believe her. That is, until I tried to go myself. I walked out of the bar and made my first, fatal mistake: I turned left instead of right. I took the elevator down one floor and found myself in a warren of corridors that led, finally, out into a hidden terrace. This area was completely deserted and, on inspection, unfinished. I was out of bounds. I walked through the garden and into a large and very smart restaurant area, also unfinished. High ceilings and soft furnishings and much foliage — I felt like I was on a movie set, more David Lynch than Wes Anderson. There didn’t seem to be any toilets. I backtracked, found a door that said ‘No Entry’ and opened it. Toilets! But these too were under construction, with conspicuous flooding across half the floor. I guessed it wouldn’t be a good idea to try and use them and went back to the restaurant. I now understood Telma’s predicament: I’d been gone a good 8 minutes at this point and still hadn’t found a working bathroom. I dallied a bit longer in the empty restaurant, imagining it full of people. I’m not a hotel connoisseur, but this one felt like it was trying its hardest not to feel like a hotel, which I would take an educated guess is what all contemporary hotels try to do. Anyway, such were the vacant thoughts going through my head when I finally spotted an employee. “It’s a bit of a maze” they sympathised, before guiding me through a semi-hidden door and out into a large courtyard area featuring a bar, an outdoor pool and, finally, some toilets. Having done my business, I followed the directions I’d been given back around up and down and through until I finally reached the bar again. Telma gave me a knowing look of “I told you so”.
This bar is promising in many ways, not least the attention given to the sound and lighting. But there’s one big problem: it’s in the basement of a very fancy hotel. I know this model exists elsewhere with the Standard hotels in London and NYC, or Doka in Amsterdam, though the Volkshotel feels much more easy-going than this place. But I feel like in Lisbon, even more than in those other cities, the location of this bar will severely limit the people who go there. It’ll just be tourists, expats, wealthy Portuguese and, of course, DJ groupies like myself. Most others will simply never set foot in this hotel and that will be to the detriment of the vibe in the bar.
(I’ll be playing there in October so I can report back on the crowd on that night.)
Unnamed new club
I had a sense that the same may end up being true of the next place I went to on Thursday, a new as-yet-unnamed club fitted into the old Le Baron bar in Chiado. Down the corridor from Carpet & Snares, this space has always had massive potential: as central as you can get, in a non-residential building (though there are people living over the road), and just the right size for a mid-sized venue. The new owners have gutted Le Baron’s faux-Wetherspoons interior entirely, replacing it with clean lines, wooden surfaces and, so I’m told, serious sound treatment. There’s a LOUD sound system (making this the third or fourth venue in Lisbon to use this Italian brand), groovy toilets with taps that don’t work, and ten euro gin and tonics. When I arrived, Liam aka Velvet Velour was taking over. The booth had a few issues: CDJs placed over the mixer without enough space for your hands; turntables sunk too far into the console, making it difficult to ride the pitch; and apparently the monitoring needs some tuning. But on the dancefloor the sound was warm, chunky, not too loud.
Despite the very real possibility that this venue will become a hangout for French people doing too much cocaine, I’m excited about the prospect of the occasional good night here. Lisbon has long been crying out for mid-sized venues that will book good DJs from abroad. (5A’s lineups started with this promise but soon lapsed into an endless churn of Lisbon’s old guard.) I was told that the owners of this new place are planning to programme plenty of commercial stuff, which I guess could go either way: it could help subsidise some more interesting underground nights, or it could take over completely. We’ll have to wait and see.
FRIDAY
Nada Temple
My friend Manu aka AAGUILAA was playing at a circuity gay party called Balagan in the new Nada Temple aka NADA 3.0 up in Prior Velho. Prior to Planeta Manas moving in three years ago, people would only ever make the journey up to this neighbourhood for the occasional afterparty (or boiler room), but now there’s both Higher Ground and Nada Temple alongside PM, and probably one or two other things I don’t know about. Manu was opening the party, so we got a lift up to the club with the promoters and went in before doors opened. As regular readers will know, I love this part of the night, and this was no exception. The first surprise was the large statues behind the DJ booth: familiar friends who previously stood in the old Europa Sunrise in Santos, where I used to go for afterparties when I lived in Madragoa.
Also familiar were the tuberous orange Pequod Hydra subs, another Italian brand, which Nada acquired towards the end of their previous venue’s lifespan. They look like something out of Alice In Wonderland or Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and, juxtaposed with the statues, they give the whole NADA 3.0 booth an unhinged aspect, part carnival part ritual sacrifice. The red light bathing the scene as Manu began his set only added to this vibe.
Muscle gays gradually filtered into the space as Manu kept things at a simmer with his customary body music: italo, techno, disco and industrial, including Daniel Maloso’s wonderful nod to Liaisons Dangereuses, ‘Ritmo Especial’. Although it must be almost impossible to achieve clear sound in a room as large and flimsily constructed as this one, the sound technician really did seem to be trying his best, and I still enjoyed the sensation of dancing in front of the big silly speakers. But I was distracted by two big, related issues: first, there was no smoke or haze to take the edge off the crowd’s early-hours self-consciousness; and second, the neon sign announcing the dark room was shining so brightly to the front-left of the booth that the only way to avoid it blinding me was to move to the back of the dancefloor behind a pillar. A generous dose of smoke/haze would have gone some way to solve that problem. Then a third big issue showed up: a muscle gay arrived sporting a chain as a necklace, which clinked incessantly out of time with the music. It was ankle-bell-gate all over again. Unable to take any more, and conscious that the music was about to take a left turn, I exited just before Manu finished his set and headed for Outra Cena.
Outra Cena
I’ve written several times about how great Outra Cena is and I am happy to report that after a year in business it is only getting better. They celebrated their first anniversary two weeks ago with an extended night of unannounced b2bs, my highlight being the closing set by Seiva and Hiroma Keo. On Friday I wanted to see Sasha Pervukhin DJ, followed by a liveset by Sasha and Anton Nazarko under the name TYSK. This project began just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the two have since been performing across Ukraine and abroad, with Anton’s vocals accompanied by Sasha’s DJ selection and scratching. Not speaking Ukrainian, the lyrical content obviously remained obscure, but the delivery and the backing music were unequivocal: dark, focussed and speaking of resistance. I’m familiar with the range of Sasha’s production work — check this compilation from his old label Laconica for a good idea — but I’d never seen him DJ before. It was sick: fast and funky electro, wacky bass, even wackier (and sometimes too silly for me) dubstep. The OC crowd must by now be used to some curveballs, yet I still noticed a few surprised looks from people walking into the room.
The OC puts stickers over your camera on entry, a policy that has earned them much flak from Portuguese google reviewers and scene stick-in-the-muds who say they’re trying to emulate Berlin clubs:
Firstly, if you’re eliciting this kind of unreconstructed vitriol from middle aged DJ bros then you’re probably doing something right. Secondly though, just like at Berghain these days, the stickers don’t seem to stop some people from insisting on getting their phones out. At one point during the DJ set I had to stop a man from trying to show Sasha a message on his phone through the DJ cage, and soon after I got annoyed by another man next to me filming the darkness. During the live show, another person in the middle of the dancefloor started holding their phone up with the screen full on, as if to broadcast another message to the DJs. I lost my temper and started pushing my way to the front of the floor to ask them to stop. Once I was close enough, however, I checked myself. The phone screen was filled with the Ukrainian flag, and once Sasha saw it and his face lit up. Defiant, the music continued.
SATURDAY
Ano Q
This was my second time attending ANO 0 Festival, this year rechristened ANO Q to reflect its connection to Lisbon’s long-running online Rádio Quântica. The festival is split across two evenings, the first at ZDB in Lisbon and the second at ADAO over the river in Barreiro. I took the ferry over on Saturday evening just in time to catch Coletivo Gira, a samba group made up of Brazilian women living in Lisbon.
We then took advantage of a break in proceedings to get some food at a local cachupa restaurant, where I got into conversation with the owner. He told me he used to be Gianluca Vialli’s butler, and as a fan of Chelsea FC in the 90s (weird but true) this blew my tiny mind. On returning to ADAO we caught the second half of a set by Maria Reis, performing solo with guitar, her lyrics lurching between desire and disaffection. The smoke machine, manned by Ano Q impresario Phoebe, was working overtime, and continued to do so through Surma’s guitar and electronics. I wasn’t a fan of Surma’s rather contrived vocals but I enjoyed the guitar freakouts. Unfortunately, in true Portuguese style the festival was running about an hour late, so I only got to hear 20 minutes or so of DJ Caring and Varela’s fun closing set before it was time to get the ferry back home. Full props to Bruno and team for continuing their great work on this festival.