What better a way to spend the latter half of one’s week than, well, out of the office? Venturing to Mucho Flow festival in Guimarães. The festival fuses sublime performance art and shapeshifting sounds into intoxicating live sets over the course of a single, sonic weekend. As the event blurb says: “Since its inception in 2013, Mucho Flow has been a hallmark for experimentation in the Portuguese music scene…By providing a stage for artists to explore new avenues, [and] by bringing experimentation into the curatorship processes… Mucho Flow has avoided the repetition, the monotone and the one genre-only approach. This year’s lineup will be crossing genres, geographies and mediums, whilst anticipating trends.”

The day one line-up was a felicitous one, with explosive sets from Aya with Sweatmother, DJ Otsoa, Marina Herlop, Kai Whiston, Poly Chain, Schwefelgelb, Slauson Malone 1, Slikback and Sofie Birch. George Riley was a personal favourite, with her celestial sounds and serious star power. Spread across a slew of avant garde indoor venues – such as Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães, Centro Cultural Vila Flor, Teatro Jordão and Teatro São Mamede – it was a smorgasbord of musical delights and drunken nights.

Day two comprised DJ Lynce, Moin, Object Blue and Luís Fernandes. Blackhaine delivered supercharged cuts from his latest EP, Armour II, which features Blood Orange, Iceboy Violet and Moseley, and ripples through the torrid choreographic prowess he’s known for. Jockstrap let their hair down in a foggy haze, dancing to the duo’s debut album, I Love You Jennifer B. Rainy Miller brought into the fold meditative vocal synths and Skee Mask had the raving crowd glued to the sticky dancefloors. Highlights, and there were many, included the soothing soundtracks of Fauzia (a regular on NTS radio) and Ill Considered, whose buzzy show erected a whole new energy. At midnight, the beauty of the festival would really come alive as hedonistic projections beam across the sites with lasers and neon lights, drenching the balmy nights and psychedelic live-shows in an electrified haze, as if by magic. It was truly an ambitious tapestry of global sounds from forward-thinking artists navigating the industry on their own terms with a top-quality, hybrid ethos.

In between sets, we got to sit down with George Riley, the London-based singer-songwriter whose milky RnB vocals and velvety beats tag her as an ultra-feminine Noughties dream girl born just a little too late. Though she studied philosophy and politics at uni, and recently completed a law conversion, music was “just one of those vocational things,” she couldn’t get away from. “Music is an outlet that makes me feel better; it’s like therapy,” she tells me as we chat over a glass of vino in a rocky, candle-lit wine bar. Inspired by Jamaican dance music, The Jones Girls and Teena Marie, her musical background is rather jazzy, mixed in with a bit of musical theatre and improv. “I’m quite comfortable in the chaos,” she declares, adding, “I’ve got a really eclectic taste and growing up in London there were just so many things to be influenced by. I think it all feeds into what I make.” Riley is also interested in space: “negative space, outer space and the moon.” She continues, “Afrofuturism, retrofuturism and bright colours inspire me too. I like to use my voice as an instrument and experiment with it and I very much write my music from personal experiences, but really, I just try to have fun and I don’t take any of it too seriously.”

Accompanied by a cellist, London-based DJ, producer and soul-stirring songbird Fauzia took to the stage the following day, cast with a warm, sanguine glow. A pile of bodies laid on the cold floor of the darkened space as her cashmere vocals swelled through the room. “The thing about me is I DJ and I do live sets, but they’re so opposite, so can I just say that my sound is fast and slow?” she poses, adding, “I’m most inspired by Mica Levi because she has her foot in between dance, electronic and classical music and that’s what I’m trying to do is take these parallel worlds and sort of bridge the gap.” Fauzia just signed her first record deal, too. “I’m not going to say who I’m signed by because I just want to let it be a moment when it comes out, but I was also just commissioned to compose my first orchestra. So, I’m currently learning how to write scores and to compose. I just finished a course at Guildhall that was how to write for orchestra and I’ve been doing piano lessons and learning notations. I feel like the world of orchestra is very elitist though. It’s very like white; very traditional,” she says, adding, “I’m trying to not only show that there are different ways to approach these things, but to, again, bridge the gap between electronic and classical music and present it in ways that aren’t so traditional.”

UK impro-Jazz act Ill Considered is unrestricted by the bounds of any singular genre. Made up of stellar saxophonist Idris Rahman, producer/mixer/drummer Emre Ramazanoglu and bassist Leon Brichard, their bodacious music was born from a pretty random jam session between the three individually renowned men. “We connected and since then our music has taken on a life of its own,” explains Rahman. “The music is our guide on this journey, all we do is turn up and play. Then whatever happens, happens.” On their serendipitous sonics, Rahman says, “It’s really hard to actually describe our sound. Unfamiliar? Instrumental? I don’t know because it can go in any direction we allow, using any kind of sonic landscape that we happen to be in.” He continues, “What we do is improvise – there’s no set or anything. If there’s an instrument that happens to be in the studio Leon will pick it up. We’ve done sessions where he did a whole recording on an unfamiliar instrument and like an hour later we had an album. I don’t know what that was: it wasn’t jazz, it wasn’t rock, it wasn’t punk, it wasn’t anything.” Ramazanoglu adds, “As soon as you start saying those words, it takes away from what it really is: improvisation curated by our taste.”

Photography courtesy of Mucho Flow.

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