"Fred Frith - a living legend at the crossroads of rock, jazz, improvisation, and composition - meets Brazilian drummer, singer, and composer Maria Portugal. Active in the Brazilian music scene for over 20 years and now based in Berlin, Portugal has forged strong ties with Europe's improvised music community. Her deep roots in the Brazilian singer-songwriter tradition, combined with a sharp interest in electronic music and improvisation as a tool for song composition, make her an artist who thrives across diverse musical contexts.

This duo is a stroke of luck: if contemporary European music has produced a truly legendary and globally significant figure in the space where all stylistic boundaries dissolve, it is surely guitarist Fred Frith. Coming from different continents, generations, and musical worlds, Portugal and Frith reveal on their debut album just how much they share - and how electrifying their common ground can be."-Intakt

"Mariá Portugal has been active on both the Brazilian and European music scenes as a creative and prolific drummer, composer, singer and producer. After graduating in classical composition, she focused on free improvisation and began extensive research on the intersection of dance and song traditions. In recent years, she has been an important voice in European improvised music. In 2020, she was the 13th musician to be Artist in Residence at the Moers Festival in Germany. As a curator, she participated in Soundtrips-NRW in Duisburg and is currently running the Toma Chocolate! concert series in Berlin. She also composes for dance, theatre and film, including the award-winning soundtrack for the film 1976, which earned her the Chilean Film Academy Award in 2025. She has performed with musicians and artists from many genres, such as Arrigo Barnabé, Elza Soares, Metá Metá, Pato Fu, Fernanda Takai, Maggie Nicols, Angelika Niescier, Fred Frith, Joe McPhee, Nick Dunston, Anthony Braxton and Tomeka Reid.

Fred Frith should be known to most of our readers, and has a long and significant CV in the field of recent improvisational music. Most recently, he was heard in Norway, with a duo concert with the Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker, with whom he has collaborated, occasionally, for several years. He is a British guitarist and he has been behind a series of innovative guitar solo albums from the 1970s onwards. He was among the founders of British avant-garde rock groups such as Henry Cow and Art Bears. While living in New York, he formed the two bands Massacre and Skeleton Crew.

He has collaborated with Robert Wyatt, Brian Eno, Lars Hollmer, The Residents, Lol Coxhill, John Zorn, Bill Laswell, Derek Bailey, the band French, among many others. In the early 80s, Frith made three albums with a relatively accessible pop sound for The Residents' label Ralph Records. Frith has also made two albums with the experimental group French Frith Kaiser Thompson, together with Henry Kaiser, Richard Thompson and John French.

The two come from two different continents, generations, backgrounds, musical universes and territories. Yet they have a lot in common. First and foremost, they both have a very unique approach to the connection between composition and improvisation. Second, both Portugal and Frith are artists who are not limited by genre and style boundaries, often crossing the boundaries between free improvisation, rock, pop, electronica, Brazilian music, folk music and jazz. And both have a unique approach to the use of the voice in improvisation.

The two played together for the first time at two concerts made in connection with Soundtrips-NRW in 2021. But their premiere as a duo was actually at the Unerhört festival in Zurich in 2022, where they played a completely improvised concert together for the first time. After that, they exchanged ideas and what they could do together later, and on June 8, 2023, they were able to meet for this recording in the small club Die Loft in Cologne.

We get four "stretches", where we consistently get a nice coupling of Frith's free and experimental guitar playing, together with Portugal's fine drumming. I remember the first time I noticed the young drummer. It was on a trio record with the Dutch saxophonist Paul van Kemenade, where she added excellent drumming. And at the beginning of Matter, I feel that it is her drumming that takes Frith by the hand and ices him into her free improvisational universe.

But it is mainly at the beginning that she takes the lead. In the second track, "See Through Blind", they are evenly matched. Frith delivers contributions as we know him from, for example, Brian Eno, while Portugal's percussion tries to fit as close to the guitar as possible. ;em without me completely thinking it works well enough.

Frith plays many slightly long notes, almost in a pedal steel landscape, and occasionally I miss him "clinking a little", even though he occasionally moves more into the experimental rock landscape we already know him from, and in "Looking Up", only Robert Wyatt's vocals are heard at the top, which continues in the fourth track "O tempo e sua secura", where we also get some vocals from Portugal, after all, she only has two hands, and when she wants to come up with something more she has to resort to her voice. This one is perhaps inspired by her native musical traditions, where she sings a theme wordlessly, over fine percussion and the guitar, which I think has been left a little too passively in the landscape. Frith's soaring playing complements Portugal's percussion and vocals, but not enough to make "the world stop and listen".

But it's a music that takes the music from Portugal's homeland into an improvised landscape that fascinates, but I think it may be a little too static for me to be fascinated. The song title "O tempo e sua secura" means something like Time and its dryness, and can, with a little willpower, be linked to the exploitation of the rainforests and the people who live there, where more and more of the forests are being removed to make way for industry and oil fields. Frith delivers a nice solo here, emphasizing the political, almost as if Ry Cooder had done it, while Portugal adds excellent percussion in the background.

But there is no doubt that this last track is the improvisation that fascinates me the most. And when Frith comes in with a kind of Native American vocal, we understand the political aspect of the song.

I feel that a lot of the music, unfortunately, is a bit too introverted for me to completely fall for what they do. Yes, it is freely improvised, and they don't know each other too well beforehand, so there will be a lot of trial and error this day at Die Loft. But the last track is almost worth the price of the entire release, because it is a gem of a song.

I hope the two will collaborate more after this release. Because if the two really find each other, this could develop into something very exciting, as they do in the final song."-Jan Granlie, Salt Peanuts (translated by Google)