SQUARE Festival joins the dots between transatlantic artistry

Perched on a bench in the foyer of a now-shuttered cinema, Portuguese promoter and festival organiser Marcio Laranjeira is arguing for the use of non-traditional spaces in staging live music events. Tonight, a roster of artists will perform in front of the former screening wall of the main auditorium, where the rows of seats have been ripped from their fittings, leaving a sloped dancefloor for hundreds to assemble. Empty frames line the walls where film posters once hung, and there’s a distinct air of nostalgia filling the space – a sort of childlike awe that returns with memory. Though it’s seen better days, Braga’s old abandoned Cinemax is teeming with people for the first time in over half a decade. Multilingual chatter spills through the front doors, and beers are being passed around drunkenly between friends. “Can you believe that we’re here, in the city centre, and this space doesn’t get used?” Marcio asks. “I think we’re very lucky.”

Braga, a northwestern Portuguese city that sits just a few miles outside of Porto, isn’t typically associated with big club nights, parties, and live music events – it’s a relatively quiet place home to just 150,000, and is often referred to as the religious epicentre of Portugal. Braga is part of the “urban quadrilateral”, as Marcio explains, one of four cities aligned in a region that share a common thread in their creative cultures. Investment is pumped equally into Braga, Barcelos, Famalicão, and Guimarães, each just a stone’s throw from the other. From January 29 to February 1, these four cities played host to the debut edition of SQUARE Festival, Marcio’s latest musical venture and his biggest yet, a hugely ambitious project where music, art, and culture intersect.

While Braga acts as the base location for SQUARE, with a conference running throughout the morning and a stacked nighttime programme hosted later at the abandoned cinema, each day brings a different bill to one of its three surrounding cities. A showcase festival at its core, line-ups are in part curated by a team of SQUARE’s partners — including record labels and festival promoters — while the other half are handpicked from a pool of entrants who applied to perform at the festival a year prior. 50 artists were selected, all plucked from each side of the Atlantic Ocean in a bid to connect transatlantic artistry and platform emerging talent from around the world. “The continents bordering the Atlantic (Europe, Africa, and the Americas) are areas with a tradition of sharing and exchanging,” Marcio says. “Those bridges are already built, but they can be developed. We wanted SQUARE to be a link between all of these places – a picture of contemporary production from different territories.”

Each of these four cities have “long had ties to independent music”, Marcio explains, though the issue now lies in maintaining those connections. “For years, artists and bands have come to northern Portugal to make music and tour. But this region also has difficulty retaining that talent. Artists are born here, they develop here, and then they get to a level where they move to a bigger city,” he says. “I think it happens in a lot of places, but we have a goal to make this region a fertile ground so that people can stay here to develop and create, and forge a place where they can live and work alongside other professionals.”

Kicking into action on Wednesday following a morning of panel discussions in Braga, attendees are shuttled off to Guimarães, a historic city littered with colourful, crumbling buildings, for the first full day of music programming. There’s an unusual array of venues on offer, from a contemporary art museum to the dilapidated underbelly of a railway arch, the latter entertaining Glasweigan queer punk duo Comfort. Distorted synthwork and offbeat drumming reverberate under the arch, bouncing from peeling wall to rusting pipe – its gritty aesthetics matching the duo’s raw, granular sound.

A short walk away inside a former textile factory-turned-nightclub, Brazilian-born, Lisbon-based DJ and producer King Kami is shelling Latin club rhythms at a breakneck pace. Brega funk melts into batida and call-and-response Jersey club, a high-octane concoction of sounds that seem to command the room – even at an early 8:PM start. The set is accompanied by a live A/V show curated by her creative partner and visual artist, Joao Parente, one that pays homage their past home in João Pessoa, Brazil, morphing through AI-generated streets and oddly familiar 3D-rendered places that evoke a sentimental feeling, created from a “memory-driven perspective”. Speaking to Mixmag after the show, King Kami explains: “My set revolves around the Brazilian northeast, from the voices to the rhythms of that region. Using generated images, we build false realities from a city we no longer live in – much like the concept of utopia.”

Back to base in Braga, SQUARE begins its first nighttime programme at the former Cinemax. Susobrino, a Bolivia-born artist now based out of Brussels, steps in front of the late-night crowd with a guitalele in hand, carefully treading from gentle Latin folk into full-throttle cumbia over the course of 45 minutes. “I love my Latin roots and I hope you can tell,” he coos into the mic. Outside in the foyer, North African DJ Retro Casetta is, as his name suggests, performing a set exclusively using retro cassette tapes. From old dusty disco laden with silky Arabic vocals to Moroccan soul and funk, his selections offer a temporary teleportation to the warmth of North Africa.

On Thursday, festivalgoers are transported to Barcelos, a small city famed for its pottery, dubbed a ‘Crafts & Folk Art City’ by UNESCO. Fittingly, today’s music showcases are taking place across a range of pottery museums and art galleries, in exception for an evening show from Portuguese metal band HETTA who tear up the intimate ground floor of a deserted shopping centre, and the first act of the day, Amsterdam’s Housepainters, who set up in the middle of a local outdoor market with their off-kilter brand of psychedelic dub. Onlookers pass by in a confused daze under the cold January sun, but there’s trepidation and excitement in seeing this quaint city come to life. “At first, people at the market were mad – they were asking what we were doing there,” says Marcio. “But then they got into the band, and our attendees started to buy things from the market. Suddenly you had 200 people shopping, which had a huge impact on the area.”

With a commitment on placing artists in venues that match their personalities, sounds, and aesthetics, SQUARE’s unconventional approach to music programming was devised after seeing artists perform in non-suitable venues at other showcase festivals, and a decision to utilise spaces that would otherwise go unused. “We think it’s important to match the artists to the space where they perform, because at some showcase festivals, there’s usually this disregard about the relationship between the artist and the venue,” Marcio says. “We wanted to use spaces that people wouldn’t expect as a venue for music and create these narratives. When we experiment, we’re taking risks of course, but it’s important to put artists in a position that they’re usually not.”

SQUARE’s penultimate day plays out in familiar fashion. Attendees are taken from Braga to neighbouring city Famalicão, a historic place packed with parishes and gorgeous greenery. Eccentric Eastern European duo SJU purr through a 45-minute set of synth-led avant pop, throwing themselves across the stage in the city’s cultural centre, Casa das Artes. Just nearby at an indoor marketplace, enigmatic four piece Fidju Kitxora – a band living between Lisbon and Cape Verde – run into some teething problems in the early stages of their set, but are quick to find their feet and pull in a crowd with their often techno-adjacent sound, bringing together kuduro and tribal drum patterns in a love letter to African diaspora music. As the evening rolls in, DJs including the likes of Guedra Guedra, De Schuurman, and ANTCONSTANTINO take turns behind that booth, a smooth amalgam of sounds that marry European, African, and South American sonics into the early hours.

On Saturday, SQUARE makes a last hurrah in Braga. Today, there’s plenty of anticipated acts spread across the city, from Portugal’s own Maria Reis, who’s hotly tipped as a favourite newcomer on Lisbon’s shoegaze scene, and Portugal-hailing drummer George Silver, bringing ethereal, weighty drum sensibilities to a local food market. With a standalone drumkit placed where fishmongers and food stalls usually set up throughout the day, George Silver works through a complex pattern of rhythms, folding in 808s on a nearby drum machine, ogled by a locked-in room. Later in the evening, Mozambique-hailing rapper EMMVR, now based in Portugal, oozes confidence on stage back at Braga’s old cinema, firing through verses while encouraging his audience to join the party.

“I wanted to create a dynamic performance that would keep the audience engaged from start to finish,” he tells Mixmag after his set. “Stage presence was key, so I made sure to interact with the crowd and let the music speak for itself. In northern Portugal, there’s a strong underground movement with artists pushing boundaries in terms of sound and lyrical content. While Lisbon often gets the spotlight, the north has a raw and authentic energy, with artists bringing unique perspectives to the genre,” he reflects. “Festivals like SQUARE are helping to strengthen this industry, and create a more connected and vibrant music culture.”

As far as debuts go, SQUARE’s first edition was nothing short of a success, its efforts pulled off in a way that even Marcio himself couldn’t foresee. With 1,000 people in attendance, there’s no aim to grow this festival outside of its already small capacity. “I think that some characteristics that make SQUARE so different and special wouldn’t work on a bigger scale,” Marcio explains. For now, this is a festival without headline acts, without a huge bill, but instead with a heady focus on audience participation. Over its four days, SQUARE blurs the line between audience and performer, its small pack of attendees travelling from show to show as a roving group, and the musicians who perform becoming part of that crowd. It’s an ambitious event made possible by money from the Portuguese government, which represents the positive impact of cultural funding, while leaving a question mark over the sustainability of future editions. But in this opportunistic moment, it’s an impressive, well-curated, and thoughtful glimpse into this corner of the world and its global artistic connections. “Here, everybody can be part of something and really be there, in the moment,” Marcio smiles.

Gemma Ross is Mixmag's Associate Digital Editor, follow her on Twitter