The multi-award-winning fado singer LINA_ is back with a new album edited worldwide by German record label Galileo Music in January 2024. This record is called LINA_ Fado Camões and has been granted the seal of Asset of Cultural Interest. Acclaimed by both Portuguese and international critics, it reached no. 1 in the World Music Charts Europe, no. 2 in the Transglobal World Music Charts Worldwide, and top of the world tracks in British magazine Songlines Magazine.
This show presents the poetry of one of the most remarkable Portuguese poets, Luís Vaz de Camões, adapted to traditional fado and produced by British artist Justin Adams (Robert Plant – Led Zeppelin, Tinariwen, Souad Massi), with musical arrangements by John Baggott (Massive Attack and Portishead). In the live show, LINA_ is joined by Ianina Khmelik (piano and synthesisers) and Pedro Viana (Portuguese guitar). The show includes videos by Collective of Two, lighting design by Tela Negra (Miguel Ramos) and live sound by Marco Silva.
https://www.youtube.com/@Linamusicfado
Lina.
The first time I heard Lina was when Carmo and António Cunha from UGURU gave me the album where the collaboration with Catalan Raul Refree took place to honour Amália. And in the first low sounds of Medo with the beautiful voice seconded by sequencers/drones/electronics in the background, something startled and comforted me. The tension between the virtuosity of the melodic phrasing and those continuous basses synthesised in some mechanised future were translated into a nuance of fado that I didn’t know. Maybe it’s the order of a particular impression, but I want to believe that Lina immediately established an angle in this thing called fado that I didn’t know. And what a feat, in a genre in which more or less canonical registers never cease, and in this relationship with nostalgia, the guitar or lack of it and the voice, a new place is invented in a tradition with shelves and shelves of theory.
In the second movement that the fado singer presents to us, in this house that becomes hers too, it will be Camões, that fado singer forgotten by the official authorities, who is honoured.
Once again, the clarity of the lines, the mysterious range in the way her voice sings the words taken from the lyrical poetry of an edition by Maria Vitalina Leal de Matos, but also the meeting with producer Justin Adams (Tinariwen, Led Zeppelin), confirm Lina as a sorcery that will surely grow. Desamor or Amor é um Fogo Que Arde Sem Se Ver are two moments that will stay with us in their lines of minimal foreboding that, as Luiz Vaz wrote, ‘comes I don’t know how and hurts I don’t know why’.
Miguel Loureiro (artistic director of the São Luiz Theatre)
