Favela Discos News

Alvorada is Montanha’s first long play: an ambient-leaning work, nocturnal in mood yet touched by electricity, tracing a journey from waking activity into dream logic. Recorded mostly in the late hours of the evening with windows open to the city, letting its air and sounds influence the music, it sometimes reached the early moments of sunrise. The title, meaning “dawn,” reflects both the liminal hours of its making and the band’s own renewal. These tracks are closer to drawings than songs: narratives written between instruments, moments of tension and release, fragments of memory and dream. The tracklist follows this nocturnal voyage with the patience of Eno, the disquiet of Uematsu, and the madness of Miles Davis’ Decoy, oscillating between streets and sleep, routine and reverie.

Montanha was formed in 2010 by André Azevedo, Nuno Oliveira, João Sarnadas, and Tito Silva, bonding over architecture school all-nighters on videogame soundtracks (Age of Empires, Super Mario). They began as a psychedelic rock combo and in 2013 released their self-titled EP which introduced a raw, improvised energy. But the album that was meant to follow was abandoned as the band entered hiatus. The four members turned their creative drive towards co-founding Favela Discos, where experimentation with media and form reshaped their ideas of music, and developed their taste, their way of playing, and a more personal sound that was more open and disconnected from a defined genre.

By 2017, Montanha had returned to the studio with new experience, no longer a rock band in the traditional sense but a project devoted to improvisation and electronic soundscapes. An ever gentrifying city forced them to abandon acoustic drums, and they embraced electronic beats instead, and became mobile; one guitar dissolved into full synths, leaving the other to converse with bass. Improvisation remained their compass. In improvisation there are no mistakes, only missed opportunities. Montanha found their opportunity in the routine of the studio to break routines of pop and experimental. The result is a body of nearly fifty hours of recordings, sculpted into an album.

Alvorada is not only Montanha’s first LP but also the dawn of their new phase. Improvised yet carefully sculpted, the record expands the territory of the song into nonlinear narratives, letting the language of night, dream, and city seep into its form.

Sistro (Sistrum) is a kind of percussion instrument that has had several incarnations and names in various cultures since the time of the Sumerians and throughout history has always been associated with religious rituals. It’s from this relationship between music and the transcendent that Nuno Oliveira (Nuno O, Judas Triste, José Pinhal Post-Mortem Experience), Tito Silva (Vasco da Ganza, José Pinhal Post-Mortem Experience) and Rodolfo Oliveira (Oficinas TK) were gradually inspired to create a trio that pays homage to this instrument of ancient times.

The project was born casually and without intentionality throughout several incursions into megalithic monuments in the hills and mountains of northern Portugal, culminating in an unusual two-day session of musical experimentation in Esposende, in September 2019. In this two-day session, codenamed “Arménio Sessions”, the trio explored a sound based on sea soundscapes, electronic beats, electric noises and the strings of na altered guitar. Channeling the strength of the elements and the mystique of the place in the form of a musical experience.

In 2021, Sistro collaborated with Mario Klingemann (aka Quasimondo) who created a music video especially for the band, created using a vintage video mixing board. Then using feedback loops and a process that Klingemann calls “Neural Edit”, which uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to correlate the raw video material with the sound.

After a long period of incubation, the group's first full-length release sees the light of day on the 31th October, 2023, moment in which a sequence of rituals begins to present and celebrate the relationship between music and the transcendent. Sistro's debut album will be released by Favela Discos, having been mixed by Tito Silva and mastered by Pedro Augusto. The photography and graphics are by Oficinas TK.

Jean-Luc Mocard met Jean Ronde in September of 2009, while working at the CASIO Palaiseau factory, near Paris. Before, they were both active musicians with a particular taste for synthesized music, touring extensively through European and Asian underground venues and clubs. Eventually, their furious passion for collecting 80’s keyboards brought them together to become the fabulous duo Vive Les Cônes.

Presently based in Porto, Portugal, by a matter of pure chance, Vive Les Cônes is a CASIO explosion, the fuel of a dancing machine that never stops and cherry picks moments from dance and pop music culture along the way. Their live concerts are non-stop hit parades featuring their very own local cult classics, such as “Bonaparty” or “Brocoli-Rave”, and medleys of pop-culture classics ranging from video-game soundtracks, to dance hits, to classical music.

“De France”, their debut album, is the product of years of playing live, training and mastering the perfect CASIO technique. Every track in this album is played live using only pure unmodded Casio PT-380 and Yamaha PSR-37 keyboards, thrift store fx pedals, bringing to the recorded form the meticulously crafted tracks that set dancefloors on fire all throughout the world.

The album is an eclectic journey through electronic and dance music on cheap keyboards, from traces of House Music in “Maillon” and the instant hit “Je Ne Sais Pas”, fumes of vaporwave in “Machine à Vapeur”, and, of course, baguettes of French electro in “Brocoli-Rave”, the track that usually andeuphorically ends Vive Les Cônes’ set.

The Quietus has referred to the duo as a “weird John Shuttleworth take on house music”, but them being French, a better comparison would be something like “Daft Punk lost all their gear on tour and had to play a gig using some old keyboards”. But could they even do it? Maybe a “Pascal Comelade on molly live set for Boiler Room” could make thembetter Justice. We’re not really sure what to compare them to though, and probably there’s no need to compare them to anything, as the best thing you can do is to give them a go and check them out for yourself.

Jean-Luc Mocard met Jean Ronde in September of 2009, while working at the CASIO Palaiseau factory, near Paris. Before, they were both active musicians with a particular taste for synthesized music, touring extensively through European and Asian underground venues and clubs. Eventually, their furious passion for collecting 80’s keyboards brought them together to become the fabulous duo Vive Les Cônes.

Presently based in Porto, Portugal, by a matter of pure chance, Vive Les Cônes is a CASIO explosion, the fuel of a dancing machine that never stops and cherry picks moments from dance and pop music culture along the way. Their live concerts are non-stop hit parades featuring their very own local cult classics, such as “Bonaparty” or “Brocoli-Rave”, and medleys of pop-culture classics ranging from video-game soundtracks, to dance hits, to classical music.

“De France”, their debut album, is the product of years of playing live, training and mastering the perfect CASIO technique. Every track in this album is played live using only pure unmodded Casio PT-380 and Yamaha PSR-37 keyboards, thrift store fx pedals, bringing to the recorded form the meticulously crafted tracks that set dancefloors on fire all throughout the world.

The album is an eclectic journey through electronic and dance music on cheap keyboards, from traces of House Music in “Maillon” and the instant hit “Je Ne Sais Pas”, fumes of vaporwave in “Machine à Vapeur”, and, of course, baguettes of French electro in “Brocoli-Rave”, the track that usually andeuphorically ends Vive Les Cônes’ set.

The Quietus has referred to the duo as a “weird John Shuttleworth take on house music”, but them being French, a better comparison would be something like “Daft Punk lost all their gear on tour and had to play a gig using some old keyboards”. But could they even do it? Maybe a “Pascal Comelade on molly live set for Boiler Room” could make thembetter Justice. We’re not really sure what to compare them to though, and probably there’s no need to compare them to anything, as the best thing you can do is to give them a go and check them out for yourself.

Judas Triste is a metatechno band based in Porto, created by David Machado, Dora Vieira and Nuno Oliveira to announce a new era of darkness to planet Earth. Born in the shadows of Favela Discos, this prophetic trio of alchemist-musicians transfigures electricity operating an ensemble of electronic appliances and objects mechanically abused. Between explosive discharges of distortion and mysterious atmospheres, the ruthless art of Judas Triste is harsh, perverse and heavily based on improvisation. 

After their debut self-titled album released in 2018, Antropomância is their second Sacrificial editorial release, an ancient lost rite of divination through human entrails. This was materialized in a 7’’ Vinyl through a Blood Pact between the record labels Love And Hate and Favela Discos.

Antropomância encapsulates two Bestial musical profanations named "Antropomância" and "Corpo Aberto", written and produced during Seven sessions of musical experimentation and technical violation. The cover was psychographed by the painter João Alves, and the Abject contains in its inside a 16 pages facsimile of Book of the Open Body.

Bezbog is a duo formed in 2013 by David Machado and Dora Vieira. Since their first release in 2014, the self-titled Bezbog EP, they have been exploring both acoustic and electronic instruments to create music that lives somewhere in between genres, styles, doctrines and musical cultures. Alongside many underground venues throughout Portugal and Spain, they have shown their work in festivals such as No Noise, Milhões de Festa, Out.Fest, and TESLA at the Castile and León Museum of Contemporary Art, and other places such as the Serralves Museum in Porto and MK Gallery in the UK.

Their latest long play takes its name from the solar deity of the slavic pantheon, Dazhbog - the god that gives, and its idea flows into the concept of this record, through the themes of life, light and darkness, birth and rebirth, and the idea of the omnipresent cycle. We can find cycles in nature, music and life itself can be thought of as a cycle, from the micro to the macro scale.

As they seek to embed their music with these ideas, in a way, their music becomes new sacred music, the music of modern pagan rituals. While Bezbog’s music seeks to replicate the meaning of what that music was, an escape from the profane and a connection to the sacred plane, in form it reconstructs it in light of the duo’s influences, from the obvious portuguese and pagan folklore, chamber and sacred music, to the darkness of doom and heavy metal, the structured improvisations of north-american jazz and psycho-acoustic hallucinations and the hash transients of electronic music.

Dazhbog, while a passenger of the same train of thought as their previous studio work, comes in a different direction from it. Chernobog consists of two short and heavy tracks, painstakingly crafted during several months, while their latest studio effort is a long suite of 8 tracks, composed and recorded live throughout 2020, that form a light and bright record where the duo embedded most of their influences. The album will come out on vinyl in late March, in time for the pagan celebration of Spring and Fertility.

Batsaykhan is the rebirth of the first project to ever release on Favela Discos, only a few hours after the label’s blogspot was put online back in 2013. Formerly known as Batsaykhantuul, Batsaykhan is not only one of Nuno Oliveira’s alter-egos but also something between a science fiction character and an ancestral spirit doomed to wander the earth in an apparently human physical manifestation.

The first album, Maestro Ir Noras, is a small and simple collection of tracks featuring only guitars and other stringed instruments, the second, being even smaller (only a single track) already seemed to lead us on through the psychedelic desert that would define the sound of the project.

After a long hiatus, Batsaykhan finally emerged from the drawer, or maybe it was from the desert, only to reveal that he had shape-shifted, now taking the form of a trio. With the help of André Azevedo and Tito Silva, Nuno started working on old demos of unpublished compositions and adapting them to the new formation. The trio started the process of refining the songs and the sound of the record, using only a strict selection of synths, percussions, bass and guitar.

They ended up settling down on a terrain of moving sands for those who feel the need to define their sound, between a forest of psychedelia, a river of ambient and the obvious desert that has buried the guitars under its “western” sand.

Batsaykhan’s self-titled release, and the project’s first long play will finally unveil itself on the last day of February, digitally and on 12’’ vinyl, with design and artwork by Rita Laranja.

140g Black vinyl LP – Printed inner sleeve – Sealed plastic sleeve



In Trux We Pux is an editorial project organized by the Porto based label and collective Favela Discos. Focusing on the city’s thriving experimental and improvised music scene, it sets out to portrait in a series of four volumes some of the characteristic sounds and collaborative practices that have been in development in Porto during the last few years.

In Trux We Pux 04 is the last in a series of four records organized by Favela Discos, set out to shine a light on Porto’s thriving experimental and improvised music scene. Throughout the collection the label tries to expose the eclectic sound and collaborative practices that have been in development in the last few years in the city by promoting the collaboration between artists and the creation of new collective improvisation pieces.

As the first album dwelled into the electronic spectre of the scene, this volume veers itself to the physical side of experimental and improvised explorations. Although there is space for outsiders manipulating the sound by electronic means, most of the music in this album is plucked, bowed, percussed or sung. The artists themselves are as varied as the music they played, among the 13 artists that collaborated for the creation of this album are many promising newcomers but also some of the more recognizable and relevant names in the scene, with the presence of the Sonoscopia founder Gustavo Costa, João Pais Filipe one of the most characteristic drummers in Portugal, and the DIY duo and underground staple Calhau!.

As we could suspect, the diverse selection of musicians, while providing us a view on the various kinds of musical languages that populate the city’s scene, also creates a dynamic collection of sounds. Spanning a large gamut of sub-sub-genres, from near-musique concrète to tribal noise, the album is a rollercoaster collage that miraculously achieves logic and cohesion, like a voyeur listener taking us on a journey through an abandoned mall where most of the bands in Porto rehearse, whose halls reverberate with a cacophony of music.

140g Black vinyl LP – Printed inner sleeve – Sealed plastic sleeve



In Trux We Pux is an editorial project organized by the Porto based label and collective Favela Discos. Focusing on the city’s thriving experimental and improvised music scene, it sets out to portrait in a series of four volumes some of the characteristic sounds and collaborative practices that have been in development in Porto during the last few years.

Milteto is an informal orchestra born out of the Favela Discos collective somewhere in 2014. The idea, that had been around for a while, was materialized for a concert in one of the first events hosted by Favela, in the extinct Picadilly Pub in Porto, a small strip club turned underground venue. It was one of those wet pre-covid nights where the condensation dripped down the mirrored walls, in a loud endurance contest that resulted in a fainted audience member.

For a very large number of reasons, it would be hard to define Milteto’s whole “career” in an album: the band has always inhabited the live context, trying to create massive immersive sound experiences for both the listeners and the musicians, subconsciously seeking to achieve transcendence by volume.

So, in reality this is a momentary reflection of an always mutating entity, instead of trying to define the several years of drastically different experiences in just 45 minutes, they took to the album as just another live presentation where they adapted to the idea of what a record could be as if they would adapt to a venue.

Faced with the idea of creating an album that reflected the project’s mutability, the band looked at the medium itself for inspiration, as the vinyl record has two sides, they thought that maybe it would be a good idea to reflect that on the music. So the recording sessions were split into two days, with two different groups of guests. One side set to recreate a more physical manifestation of the band, the other a more mental side, the first teeming with percussion, the other with electronic devices and synthesisers.

140g Black vinyl LP – Printed inner sleeve – Sealed plastic sleeve

In Trux We Pux is an editorial project organized by the Porto based label and collective Favela Discos. Focusing on the city’s thriving experimental and improvised music scene, it sets out to portrait in a series of four volumes some of the characteristic sounds and collaborative practices that have been in development in Porto during the last few years.

In Trux We Pux 02 contains the first of Favela Discos’ collective pieces to be published, and it was chosen to represent a long series of site-specic pieces developed by the collective since its formation. Most of the time these pieces remain lost in time or in the label’s archives.

Desilusão Óptica is an audiovisual piece developed for the festival Serralves em Festa 2017 and was recorded between the concert and rehearsals. The piece is influenced by the book Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, and tries to explore the notion of auditory hallucination, in this case based on the idea of a phantom sound unconnected to its object.

Starting quietly with a single flute note, Desilusão Óptica slowly grows fuller but more uncomfortable as the pitch rises gradually in a hypnotic effect. The sound we hear is a mix of the sound produced live, its manipulation and repetition, thus the piece exists between the time when it happens, its immediate repetition and ghosts of past sounds.

The flute, delayed and sampled, embodies both the sounds it produces and memories of past sounds, creating a confusion between objecto and sound. The sound is produced by an object but is at the same time separated from it, like in Mulholland Drive when we watch a singer emotionally dedicated to a performance and whose voice keeps on singing even when her body collapses.

Like in Dub Music, the musicians are divided into two groups: those who play, in this case divided by winds, percussion and electric guitars, and the dub master / sound manipulators who launch samples of previous recordings and manipulate the sound that is produced live, through loopers and delay pedals.

140g Black vinyl LP – Printed inner sleeve - Sealed plastic sleeve

In Trux We Pux is an editorial project organized by the Porto based label and collective Favela Discos. Focusing on the city’s thriving experimental and improvised music scene, it sets out to portrait in a series of four volumes some of the characteristic sounds and collaborative practices that have been in development in Porto during the last few years.

In Trux We Pux 01, the first record of the collection, is focused on the electronic side of the eclectic but characteristic experimental and improvised scene in Porto, and contains a selection of 23 musicians that have been developing their own take on whatever niche genre they dwell in. Among the list of musicians are Filipe Silva (HHY & The Macumbas), Crónica Electrónica’s heads @c, ocp, coletivo vandalismo and several others that populate a thriving scene that spans a wide gamut of sounds, from delicate to abrasive.

As the tracks themselves, the different approaches to composition and production add to this compilation’s schizophrenia. The first side of the record offers us a spacious and abstract scenery, starting with a collage of field recordings, banjos, and fans, narrated by google translate’s voice. The following two tracks flow along the granular tide of ambient spaces and atmospheres slowing down a bit before the second side turns around 180º and heads towards more rhythmic fields.

Coletivo vandalismo & querido lider present us with their exploration of half balearic, half german-synth-music pulsing away at the beat of broken down dancehallish drums and reggae breaks. Challenger & Lorr No’s track is a trainwreck heading down a break driven jungle that lead us to the album’s closing arguments: MOSCXS’ sludged beat goth-step exploration around the poem “Poema Agreste” by Glória de Sant’Anna.