The words in this album are re-adaptations of the Cancioneiro do Bairro Alto — an 1864 collection of obscene and satirical sonnets collected in the heart of Lisbon’s bohemian and red-light district: the Bairro Alto, now home to the city’s vibrant dance scene. These verses mocked the powerful, praised the whore, and revealed that otherwise hushed by polite society.
This album follows the course of a single night through twelve tracks:
- At dusk, a muse is invoked.
- In the taverns, laughter and drunken bragging swell.
- In the streets, satire sharpens into grotesque parody.
- At midnight, Saudade hushes the city into longing.
- In the small hours of the night, bodies cry out in fever.
- By dawn, silence returns until the cycle begins again.
The sonnets have been distilled, interpolated, and re-cast as songs, their grit and bawdiness left intact, and their lyricism carried forward. This music is an echo of the Bairro Alto’s nights re-imagined in chillwave with Novo Fado phrasing, accompanied by the strumming of the Portuguese guitar.
Concurrent with the release of Uma Noite no Bairro Alto is an English version: A Night in Bairro Alto. Each track of this album re-adapts the sonnets into English, keeping the rawness of its language, and preserving the hazy, cyclical, intoxicating sound world as presented in the Portuguese.
The format of the songs does not lend itself to full translations of the sonnets; longer-form songs are in future releases:
Cancioneiro do Bairro Alto I-VII
Songs of Bairro Alto I-VII