Or Sobre Blau - Making Friends (Stroom TV) [Freak Folk]

*** This blog post first appeared in TSMM's July 26th Newsletter, where you can get all the tips (and more) first ***

Or Sobre Blau were conceived in 2017, just at the end of Lisbon’s heyday as Europe’s trendy city for the young and restless to move to. I know, as fashionably late I moved there in 2018, just as it was becoming the digital nomad and ruthless property developers’ city of choice, Europe’s latest oversaturated tourist hell hole and prohibitively expensive for the poorly paid locals - all at the same time. I don’t miss it, and certainly couldn’t afford to rent there these days.

It’s where two guitarists - Andreu G. Serra and Kiran Leonard met and hit it off socially and musically, resulting in The Piri Piri Samplers, a meeting of Serra’s sometimes raucous, more experimental electrocoustic inclinations, and Leonard’s gentler acoustic ways, and let’s face it sweet and sour always tastes good. They were then encouraged by Stroom TV, who reissued the album, to record a follow-up, which they did in London’s Lewisham, oddly a borough where I also lived.

The album is a wilfully meandering, compositionally playful, yet artistically serious slice of freak folk meets oddball, unhurried, stoner post-rock (alternative genre suggestions welcome in the comments), that was born from weekly improvised recording sessions over a six month period, so it’s a wonder it sounds as cohesive as it does. Whether it’s entirely a collage, or they played over a painstakingly assembled musical mosaic made from the recordings, I’ll leave that to you and the far geeky corners of music Reddit to discuss. What I do know is that you need to go on this journey; it’s tender and abrasive, curious and crafted, sweet and occassionally grating, live and sample-strewn, intense and soothing, but always intimate. Like they’re playing just for you and you alone, which is how I suggest you listen to it.

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Playlist Companion

Find Or Sobre Blau in the Slow Folk Playlist.