They call themselves ‘three people from Porto, between the poetic and the mundane, with plenty of time to burn’. They owe their name to Eça de Queiroz: it's one of the last lines in the novel The Mandarin, a tale about the dangers of greed. This was a theme present in the lyrics of João Amorim (lead singer, who also has a leg up on the guitar), of course, but the main purpose of the name was to emphasise Portugueseness. After all, the band was going to be called ‘Língua Morta’ (Dead Tongue), due to the despair the musicians felt at seeing so little music sung in their language.

But one more coincidence: as with Eça, there's an attachment to the city where they were born - Porto. In addition to the walking tour that are the lyrics of ‘Croché’, where there is a fondness for the conductivity of Porto's streets for wandering, there is a criticism that they launch in unison: ‘There are few venues that programme live concerts, very few. If we hadn't organised concerts in places where we set up ourselves, we'd have done almost nothing,’ says Manuel Dinis (guitar and vocals).

Away from the weddings, they went on a solid tour this summer, travelling all over the country. According to João Campello (bass and vocals), "it was really good, I got to know places like Pombal de Ansiães, places I would never have gone to on my own", and also "I learned how to deal with playing in places with little space, or where there isn't the exact equipment and you have to find a way to play in that configuration".

Playing at parties in places where few people knew them, working on the EP 'Nunca Mates o Mandarim Cantam os Clássicos' - covers of Portuguese national anthems, from Carlos Paião to Ruth Marlene, which the band themselves describe as "a collection of indie-pop-rock arrangements that revisit the brilliance of ballet" - was a great help. Campello admits the trick worked. We play Pó de Arroz and everyone who doesn't know us knows it by heart. They sing along and know what we're doing, but they also thought we were a Diapasão tribute band.

Their bio on some platforms states that ‘Marquise wanted to be a balcony in Porto, but they blocked off the open air’ and so ‘armed with a throat, drumsticks and picks, they fiercely attack the walls to make themselves known to the world’. The text, by comrade Daniel Catarino from the Saliva Diva label, is much appreciated by the band, but they recognise it as a post-facto creative defence: in fact, the name Marquise came up shortly before their first live gig - after all, they had to be announced somehow. So it became a reference to the place where they rehearse, in Praça do Marquês. A simple and straightforward origin that suits a band that seems to flow naturally through everything.

When we sat down to talk to the alliterative Mafalda (Rodrigues, vocals), Miguel (Pereira, guitar), Miguel (Azevedo, bass) and Matias (Ferreira, drums), they had just returned from playing in Paredes de Coura, on the stage that animated the town centre as part of the festival. Miguel Pereira talks about how he ‘didn't expect so many people’ to come to see them and how, apart from the ‘immense energy’ that this transmits to those on stage, they were surprised to see so many people singing with them. ‘It's one thing for them to sing with us at concerts we give in Porto, but to go out on this circuit and still see people singing was a surprise.’

And playing what? Marquise reject genres that are too closed off, as they say they have too many influences to lock themselves into a label. But even so, you can see a hint of grunge that is harmonised with an indie rock rhythm. All this is underpinned by Mafalda's mellifluous voice, which Matias recognises as an asset to the band: ‘We were lucky enough to find someone who writes well in Portuguese and can sing well in Portuguese.’

So the choice of mother tongue wasn't necessarily a heated internal debate, it was something that emerged naturally in the composition of the songs. As was the case with the recording of their first EP - after a concert at the Faculty of Architecture, the sound technicians from that event, who were setting up Estúdios Cedofeita, came to suggest recording their first work. In this whole line of happy coincidences, only one point creates friction: the band does its own booking, and notices some difficulty in finding venues in which to perform.

Unlike the other projects, in just two years Joana Raquel is already on her second album - Queda Áscua, which followed Ninhos. The secret lies in the great driving force behind jazz in the city, the Porta-Jazz Association, which Joana already frequented regularly, but which she joined as part of the team in February. ‘Porta-Jazz was a must in the city for a jazz musician, and it made perfect sense for me to release my music with them,’ she recalls.

Joana is from Ançã, in Coimbra, where her first contact with creating music took place in the local philharmonic band, lending her breath to an oboe. The next step came in Coimbra, when she enrolled on a professional jazz course: ‘I think my life is a bit of a fluke, because I don't plan much, but things happen. I didn't know much about jazz music until I went on the course and that's where I learnt everything.’ It was also the place where he learnt to separate himself from his oboe, an instrument that ‘doesn't really fit in’ with the genre.

Free time became associated with the freedom of not having to conform to the norms implicit in teaching, and as she saw himself ‘doing something further away from that’, she started ‘doing the exercise’ of writing his own music and lyrics. In the Porta-Jazz ecosystem she found support for her first disc in pianist Miguel Meirinhos: ‘I have a lot of impulses to start things, but then I have trouble finishing, and he has trouble starting, so it worked out so well!’

After this first Ninhos, with a traditional quartet of piano, double bass, drums and voice, Queda Áscua represents an even greater escape into freedom. ‘Here I mixed my influences: when I was writing, I was listening to music outside of jazz, more songs, so I tried to do something that starts with a theme, and then goes into improvisation.’

Theyare two, but count as one: FOQUE is a producer from Porto, and Black Lavender is an American singer who moved here in 2022. Their story begins with ghosting. FOQUE (Luís Leitão's nom de guerre) was already following Black Lavender's work, and during confinement sent him several messages with beat proposals for possible collaborations. Black Lavender, who was confined to Madrid at the time, read them but didn't reply.

It wasn't out of coldness, but rather a need on Black Lavender's part to conduct creative processes in person. The opportunity arose when Black Lavender moved permanently to Porto - the city where he had been spending all his holidays for some years. That's where the meeting took place, as well as their first studio session - the duo became inseparable until today, the moment when they're already in the final stages of the album they've been cooking up. Before Porto, in the aftermath of the pandemic, their paths seemed perpendicular, inching ever closer to intersecting.

FOQUE began by studying theatre, although he had always been active in rock and progressive music projects. After three years studying theatre in Porto, he moved to Lisbon and decided to change direction: while staying in the theatre field, he worked on composing and arranging music for plays, while also studying music production on his own. His stage name, FOQUE, came about when he decided to take on a focus area in his work: this is how he signs, for example, his solo album ‘Ato isolado’, and his production roles for artists such as DAMA or Special ADZ, and compositions for soundtracks. But Black Lavender anticipates problems: ‘It's going to be hard to say your name live when we're interviewed on American talk shows.’

The duo's first album is almost out, but there are already two singles and a song ‘used to test methodologies and pave the way for singles’. There is great tonal diversity between the three: ‘Tri State’, the pre-album test, is based on warm beats for a relaxed flow; ‘Say Less’ (also in collaboration with B Ghost, a Brazilian based in Porto) is a vibrant song about the end of a relationship; and the most recent single, ‘Bandits’, refers to a groove typical of ‘blaxpoitation films, an environment that interests me immensely’, according to Black Lavender. All of them are clues to the album that will be released on 4 October at Torto.