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When I made this playlist, I was starting to miss the feeling of walking through the streets of Lisboa, the light that hits the retina and warms the heart, the smell of the river at high tide, that semi-demonic traffic that to me, always riding my Vespa, means someone trying to run me over at least 3 times a day…

It is a freestyle selection, ranging from platonic Greek electronic music of the eighties to the funk being made right now in Estonia, choices that move in the blink of an eye from the current new French disco to any kind of ancient Frisco experimentalism produced in the Bay Area. New and old. Obtuse, odd, sometimes sharp, like anyything I would have liked to have heard in late 1978 when I first went to Browns, behind Avenida de Roma. Maybe like everything that I ended up listening to a year or so later in that tiny Yes club in Padre Manuel da Nóbrega, a mere 10 minutes southbound stroll if you crossed the Linha da Cintura train line at the current Roma/Areeiro station.

All this because this M4we was made thinking geographically about that side of our capital, buildings that do not scrape the skies, that are so horizontal as vertical, New Avenues filled with people “of yore”, those late afternoon rendez-vous at Vavá on the way to Heróis rehearsals, midnight rerun sessions at Quarteto cinema (where I ended watching Carpenter’s Escape from New York around 16 times), Paulinho and Silvia, Luis and Lena, wonder couples that no longer exist, the ice cream from Conchanata, those last concerts in the grand Alvalade projected by Lima Franco and Filipe de Figueiredo.

This is not a nostalgic trip, it is the certainty of a modernity that was being drawn in Lisboa which I have not only watched but in which I existed, for which I insisted. It is also a hike from Tique Taque to Tico-Tico, roaming through other uncertain sites that no GPS knows how to locate.

That city is gone, other is the one we have now, more renewed but also more precarious of tales and fables that rock us into reverie. Our master-rambler Fernando Pessoa said that “a man is the size of his dream”. Little did he know how true that sounds…

This weekend feel no borders or barriers.

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#staysafe #musicfortheweekend