Matéria Prima, which once lived in a basement in the same street, is now a large, ‘nice and airy’ shop that is often visited by tourists, but which remains a kind of place of worship for aficionados of more ‘obscure’ music that is further away from the so-called mainstream. It's the ideal place for those who like to explore new universes of sound. Like Carlos Milhazes himself. Born in Póvoa de Varzim, he came to study at the Soares dos Reis School at a very young age and it was during the second week of classes that he discovered Matéria Prima, an event that perhaps changed the course of his life. ‘I realised I didn't want to go to class,’ he says, laughing. He became a regular there; he spent so much time browsing the records and cassettes and chatting to the clerk at the time that, one summer, he ended up taking it over during his holidays. Now he jokingly says that it's there that he ‘earns and spends his salary’.

As well as collectors and those interested in very specific musical genres, ‘there's a niche of people who are genuinely curious and want to learn about new music - and they're not exactly a cultural or economic elite,’ he tells us. He adds: ‘We really struggle to counter the idea that we're a shop made for the elite, or that it's a niche shop, but considering the independent labels and the musical genres, I think that's something you always feel.’

Millhazes admits that his ‘favourite customers’ are people who ‘are not very familiar with these musical genres, but are very curious about them’. ‘I think you need a spirit of curiosity to consume the kind of things we sell,’ he emphasises. He notes, however, that ‘what is considered “strange music”, “marginal music”, “popular music” are separations that come very much from habit and familiarity with the sounds’. ‘Most of the things we sell are very accessible to the ear and very easy to listen to,’ he says.

In this sense, he says he likes to show people ‘something different that they might like’. ‘This goes for people who are used to listening to commercial pop music and maybe I try to recommend things that have that pop matrix, but which are slightly different; and it goes for people who come from a more singular and more particular space of an artist who maybe can't occupy a space in commercial pop, because it's not sellable to the masses, but which is still quite interesting,’ he says. ‘To those who try to reserve their taste for less accessible music, who have that slightly more isolated and ‘selfish’ taste, I like to try to provoke them into liking things that everyone likes and that are genuinely good,’ he says.

He explains: ‘Six years ago, a cassette was under a euro; today, it's around five, six euros. I've always felt that cassettes were an exciting format for independent publishers, who would make an edition of 50 or 100 copies and then sell them at concerts with very considerable margins. Today, for it to make sense to produce a cassette, it has to be sold for 15 euros, and then nobody will buy it,’ he laments. The same goes for the price of vinyl, with an LP going for around 40 euros. ‘The raw materials are much more expensive, and I feel that small publishers are already starting to lose interest in these formats and are looking for other solutions; maybe they're betting on digital publishing and producing merchandising, so that they have some kind of physical object for sale at concerts, instead of cassettes, vinyls and CDs.’

Milhazes regrets that analogue formats are becoming ‘undemocratic’. ‘These formats continued to exist precisely because they were democratic, because it was accessible and easy for an independent publisher or a musician to make a private edition,’ he concludes.

The resurgence of LAMA, the label that was born out of friendship

Despite the constraints that publishing discs can represent for small music labels, he ventured into the area and, with his first salary from Matéria Prima, founded LAMA, a label where he released ‘Portuguese, exploratory, danceable music’. His partner in this adventure was his friend Luca Massolin, an Italian mellomaniac who has lived in Porto for over a decade and a half and is a DJ, vinyl collector, owner of the record shop 8mm Records and the person responsible for the selection of records at Fiasco, both in Bonfim. Together, they produced four editions and suspended the label, which will be reactivated later this year. When it started, it was ‘more orientated towards experimentation within dance music’, says Milhazes, who is keen to point out that he is ‘always reluctant’ to use the word experiment - ‘it's often misinterpreted, I don't like the understanding of culture as something for the elites’.

LAMA came about ‘without much intention’. The first two editions were made up of national musicians and also in the name of friendship. A friend had written some songs that were to be released by XL Recordings, the British independent label, but his expectations were dashed. Milhazes, who loved music, stepped forward and decided to publish them himself. It was this edition that would define LAMA's direction, ‘so as not to enter very different musical spectra and to maintain some consistency’. But he wasn't particularly interested in that genre and, he says, ‘got bored’. Now, the label is going down other sonic paths: ‘The new things are more or less in the same spirit, but they're closer to the genres resulting from the Caribbean diaspora in England; we're going to publish an English duo and a French musician,’ he reveals.

Concerts: ‘Porto is an incredible city’

Milhazes praises Porto's music scene and says that, given its size, ‘it's an incredible city’, pointing to Hotelier as a good example of a venue that takes the risk of bringing in musicians and genres that are little known to the public. ‘I go to the Hotelier and there are 50 people watching a concert by a musician who then goes on to play at Cafe OTO in London, which is ‘the big room’ for this musical universe in Europe, and has between 100 and 150 spectators. In terms of scale and percentage of the population, we're not doing badly at all; in fact, we're doing very well!’ he says. It's no coincidence that he also curates concerts at Hotelier from time to time - ‘less regularly than I'd like’. But he is impartial when he says that ‘it's one of the most beautiful and important spaces in the city’. ‘The way things happen there, with a detachment from pretences and canons, is really beautiful,’ he says.

‘Sometimes I go to concerts at the Hotelier that I don't particularly like and never once do I feel like I'm wasting my time; and it never loses demand, funnily enough.’ In this sense, he argues that ‘it's fundamental for any cultural space to preserve an identity and a [cultural] language without devaluing the others, but realising that the others have to happen in other spaces’. ‘In order for spaces to be solid, in order for the public to trust them, they have to respect an expectation,’ he emphasises. And he adds: ‘Those who go to Hotelier have the expectation of seeing a concert by an artist they probably don't know that well, but who they know, at worst, will be pleasant enough to take a nap, and that they'll eat a good plate of food cooked by Paula at the end of the concert.’

An art gallery called Branda

A film graduate, he admits that ‘when I was a kid, it was an even bigger passion than music’. Although music is his main occupation, he still devotes a lot of time to the seventh art (he is also a member of the Selection Committee for the Transmission Competition at the Porto/Post/Doc festival), literature and the visual arts. ‘I manage to occupy my life with all my interests,’ he says. In April, together with his friend Francisco Oliveira, he created Branda, an art gallery that aims to give visibility to emerging artists. ‘Branda is Fiasco's basement, although I avoid explaining the gallery as ‘the basement of a pub’, because I think that takes away some responsibility, and we feel a lot of responsibility,’ he emphasises. The space opened with an exhibition by the artist Letícia Costelha and, in the meantime, has also been home to a cycle of Middle Eastern cinema curated by Francis de Assis and Saif Fradj. Since the end of September, the exhibition ‘Um salto no espelho’ by João Melo has been open to the public.