Manuel de Oliveira & Bianca Gismonti

(PT/BR)

There are encounters that only music can explain. Portugal and Brazil share an ocean, a language and a particular kind of melancholy, that ability to transform longing into beauty. But they also share something less often spoken of: a tradition of instrumental music that refuses to be merely an accompaniment, that insists on having a voice of its own, on telling stories without words. It is within this tradition that Manuel de Oliveira and Bianca Gismonti find their place, and it is from this that they forge their own path.

When a guitarist from Guimarães and a pianist from Rio de Janeiro sit together on stage, without a score or a roadmap, they are doing more than just making music: they are renegotiating that long and sometimes painful history, in real time, with two instruments and all their accumulated life experience.

Manuel de Oliveira learnt the guitar from his father, Aprígio Oliveira, and it was through his own efforts that he travelled the world in search of other traditions: flamenco, South American music, fado. Largely self-taught, he has built a language that is immediately recognisable in its constant evolution, always exploring the same themes: borders, identity, territory, community. What does it mean to belong to a place? What remains when one leaves? In 2022, the album Ibéria 20|22, recorded with Jorge Pardo and Carles Benavent, the same musicians with whom he made his debut twenty years ago, earned him the Carlos Paredes Prize, the highest honour in Portuguese instrumental music.

On the other side of the ocean, Bianca Gismonti, daughter of pianist, guitarist and composer Egberto Gismonti and actress Rejane Medeiros. She grew up surrounded by music just as one grows up in a house, inevitably, without choice and without regret. At the age of nine she began studying the piano; by fifteen she was already accompanying her father on tours around the world. The legacy of Egberto Gismonti, one of the most unique architects of Brazilian instrumental music, who fused European classical music, American jazz and Amazonian rhythms into a body of work of rare depth, is in every note Bianca plays. But the voice she has forged is entirely her own.

Over the course of a two-decade career, Bianca has toured Europe, Asia and the Americas with the Duo Gisbranco and with her own trio; she has collaborated with Chico César, Jacques Morelenbaum, Nana Vasconcelos and Mônica Salmaso; and has released a discography that grows in depth and daring with every instalment. Manuel de Oliveira, for his part, has built a solid European reputation over more than twenty years. He has performed alongside Brad Mehldau, Chick Corea, Mike Stern and Richard Galliano.

The partnership between the two emerged with the naturalness of things that should have happened sooner. In early 2026, they gave eight concerts in Brazil: Florianópolis, Blumenau, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo. In every venue, the same experience is described by the audience: the sensation of witnessing a dialogue in which silence matters just as much as sound.

The repertoire is entirely original, situated somewhere between fado, jazz and MPB without fully belonging to any of the three. Guitar and piano breathe together, explore polyrhythms, and construct soundscapes where improvisation is not ornament but structure. Between them, silence becomes a landscape. Sound transforms into an encounter that Med is honoured to host.

Sangue Suor

(PT)

Some music is born of a place. And some music is born of a need.

Portugal has a long-standing relationship with rhythm. From the percussion of the batuques that crossed the Atlantic to the taut skins of festival drums and bass drums. It is a country that holds within its body what it cannot express in words. At a time when almost everything fits onto a screen, three musicians decided to insist on the opposite: on weight, on matter, on the physical encounter with the instrument.

It all began with a number: 106. The years of existence of the Theatro Circo de Braga, celebrated in April 2021 with the commissioning of a commemorative track. Rui Rodrigues, a veteran of projects such as At Freddy’s House, OSSO and Ângela Polícia, proposed something unusual: a percussive moment shared with other drummers. He invited Ricardo Martins, whose extensive career includes Pop Dell'Arte, Jibóia and Filho da Mãe, and Susie Filipe, of the Moonshiners and SIRICAIA. The resulting track was called Sangue & Suor.

The three come from different backgrounds: rock, experimental music, theatre, the street. But they recognised themselves in the same hunger for sound. This was followed by artistic residencies in Leiria, far from the pressure of the stage, in search of a language they had not yet explored together. In 2023, they released O Salto, produced in partnership between Theatro Circo and Omnichord Records, featuring six tracks and guests who map out a vibrant and diverse Portuguese scene: Surma, Selma Uamusse, LARIE and Cabrita. Names that open up the trio’s rhythmic universe to melodies, synthesizers and electronic textures, in a dialogue between organic percussion and processed layers.

Sangue Suor’s sonic identity is a rare beast. Three drum kits arranged like a small army, polyrhythms that could just as easily evoke dance as trance, a nightclub as a shamanic ritual.

The resulting sound is restless and crosses boundaries between the experimental and the danceable, between fury and meditation, between chamber jazz and electronica, between Portugal itself and the diaspora.

Sangue Suor arrive at Med with a well-established repertoire and a rapport on stage that only time can create. That which remains after giving everything.

Daniel Kemish & Friends

(UK)

The heartland of America isn’t confined to America alone. It exists wherever a man picks up a guitar, gazes at the horizon with the resignation of those who have lost much and the stubbornness of those who carry on regardless, and decides to put it all into a song. It exists in Nashville, in Bakersfield, in the cotton fields of Mississippi, but it also exists, more improbably and therefore more interestingly, in a childhood spent in Portugal, in a British boy who grew up between the Atlantic and the Alentejo and remained forever convinced that he was born on the wrong continent.

Daniel Kemish was born in the UK, but it was in Portugal that he grew up, and this dual identity shaped in him something that genuine Americans rarely achieve: the necessary distance to view tradition clearly, without the pressure of having to defend or betray it. He began playing in British bars and clubs in 2006, performing other people’s songs, searching for his own voice. In 2011, he decided it was time to have something of his own to say. He had accumulated stories of roads travelled, of nights in nameless countries etched in his memory, of people met and left behind.

Daniel Kemish’s music is American American in the noblest sense of the term. The kind that precedes trends and survives them. Blues, country, alternative folk, all filtered through the lens of someone who knows the tradition because he loved it before he studied it.

The debut album Fools & Money, recorded at the legendary Ocean Way Studios in Nashville – where Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello and R.E.M. had previously recorded – was released in 2016 and immediately set the tone: a raspy baritone voice, observational and sombre lyrics, and country music filtered through the sensibilities of 1970s outlaw rock. The influences are clear and acknowledged. Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Bob Seger. But what Daniel Kemish does with them is his own: not imitation, but lineage. The second album, Under The Same SkySky, was written in radical isolation, in a refuge in the Austrian mountains with no electricity, no running water, no telephone, heated only by a wood-burning stove and the urgency to create. In 2023, Hard Times, recorded entirely on analogue tape at Welcome to 1979 Studios in Nashville, mixed live without a computer, cut directly to vinyl from analogue masters, arrived as a statement of principle: that the honesty of the sound matters just as much as the honesty of the words.

Daniel Kemish has built much of his reputation as a solo artist. Just him, his guitar and the room. But over the years he has gathered trusted musicians for those moments when the songs called for more than a voice and six strings. The Friends accompanying him at MED are not mere decoration: they are the natural extension of a sound that grows when shared.

Natacha Atlas

(EG/BE)

In the 1990s, as the global music scene began to embrace fusion and hybrid identities, a voice emerged that defied boundaries: Natacha Atlas. She is the defining symbol of a generation that sought to unite East and West. From London’s urban electronic scene to the melismatic echoes of ancient Cairo, her music was, and continues to be, a space where cultures meet, engage and reinvent themselves.

The daughter of a father of Arab origin (with Egyptian, Moroccan and Palestinian roots, and some Sephardic ancestry) and an English mother, Natacha grew up between Brussels and the UK, moving between worlds with ease. Her artistic breakthrough came in the mid-1990s, in the multicultural epicentre of London, through the label Nation Records, a bastion of daring fusions between electronic, dub and Arabic music. It was also there that she crossed paths with Transglobal Underground, a collective that opened the doors (and with whom she continues to perform) to a boundless sonic imagination. This collaboration established her signature style: an alchemy of machines and maqams, synthesizers and derbakes, beats and baladi.

From her solo debut Diaspora (1995) to albums such as Gedida (1999) and Ayeshteni (2001), Atlas has forged a coherent and adventurous career. Her voice moves freely between Arabic dialects, English and French; she blends the Egyptian vocal tradition of Umm Kulthum with the cosmopolitan drive of trip-hop and electronic music. She has collaborated with masters such as Nitin Sawhney, Jean-Michel Jarre and Ibrahim Maalouf, and has successfully reinvented herself towards a more acoustic, chamber-music sound, where the lute and Arabic violin coexist with the double bass and piano.

Natacha Atlas’s music is, above all, a place of plural belonging. Her warm, translucent voice acts as a bridge between continents and historical eras. Each song is a journey: from the Maghreb to the Levant, from Andalusian melancholy to electronic vibes, from Sufi spirituality to pop desire.

Nine years after performing at the Ciclo Mundos at the Teatro da Trindade, Natacha Atlas returns to Portugal with a luminous maturity. Her voice continues to exude the same hypnotic power, now more refined, more wise. Accompanied by musicians who move between jazz improvisation and classical Arabic phrasing, the artist transforms the concert into a sensory ritual: ancestral and futuristic, intimate and universal.

Expresso Transatlântico

(PT)

There is a Lisbon that cannot be captured on a postcard. It cannot be summed up in verses of longing or on a tourist brochure. It is a melting pot, constantly on the move, open to the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the rest of the world. From this Lisbon, Expresso Transatlântico transforms the Portuguese guitar into the leading character of a musical film that is equally at home in an intimate club as it is at a major rock or world music festival.

At the heart of the trio is Gaspar Varela, an exceptional Portuguese guitarist and great-grandson of the legendary fado singer Celeste Rodrigues, an heritage that ensures a direct link to the fado house and the legacy of Amália. Alongside him, his brother Sebastião Varela takes up the electric guitar and Rafael Matos the drums, shifting fado into a territory where tradition engages, without blind reverence, with the city of today. They do not come to ‘evangelise’ fado, as they like to emphasise; rather, they come to prove that the DNA of fado can survive and flourish beyond the boundaries of the genre.

Following a debut EP presented at WOMEX 2022 (the world’s largest music fair), they released the album Ressaca Bailada in 2023. A work described by critics as a ‘dance of beauty and fury, longing for the future’, where fado intersects with rock, blues, funaná, samba and echoes of Portuguese-style westerns, amongst references ranging from Dead Combo to Zeca Afonso.

On stage, Expresso Transatlântico is something else entirely. The music takes on a life of its own, an urgency, a physicality that the recorded versions merely hint at.

They bring to MED their second and latest album, released in January this year. Trópico Paranóia, produced by Paulo Furtado (The Legendary Tigerman), takes on more risk and tension, looking squarely at a world in decline, without losing the festive pulse that defines it.

At a time when walls are being erected and diversity is viewed with suspicion, Expresso Transatlântico responds with a humanist celebration. Their diversity is a source of richness, not a threat.

Tangomotán

(FR)

From the very beginning, MED has been a festival that has always embraced music from beyond the vast Mediterranean basin. The fourth edition in 2007 closed with a performance by the Argentine group Bajofondo Tango Club, led by guru Gustavo Santaolalla.

Nineteen years on, MED welcomes a new electro-tango collective that evokes these and other fond memories, such as those of the Gotan Project.

Tangomotán is a Parisian quartet, formed in 2016, which reinvents tango as the music of today: a visceral fusion of Argentine tradition, classical European training and danceable electronic beats. It is augmented tango (and not electrotango), as they like to point out.

Constituído por músicos exímios de formação clássica nos conservatórios de Paris (CRR, CNSM) e Gennevilliers, como Blanche Stromboni (contrabaixo), Marie Anne Faupin (bandoneon), Robin Apparailly (violino) e Leandro Lacapère (piano), este ensemble transforma o palco num laboratório de tango vivo, acessível e electrizante.

Tangomotán’s sound blends traditional tango, featuring bandoneon, violin, piano and double bass, with electronic elements (such as loops and distortion). Building on traditional melodies, they amplify rhythms and improvisations, echoing the pioneers of electronic tango, yet with a working-class and humanistic touch, always centred on dance and the genre’s vibrant energy. The album Motán (2024) and the more recent L’Étreinte (2026) are the most complete demonstration of this alchemy: music that knows where it comes from and isn’t afraid of not knowing where it’s going.

Live, they dress the bleu de travail for a raw and authentic look, giving themselves over to visceral performances of improvisation and acoustic-electronic fusion. From intimate venues to major festivals, they mesmerise with infectious energy, transforming every concert into a modern, universal milonga.

For Tangomotán, tango is not a genre of the past, closed in on itself; it is a living language, capable of absorbing the present without losing its character.

Lalalar

(TR)

Istanbul is a city that never sleeps. Over the centuries, it has been the capital of empires, a crossroads between East and West, a living repository of civilisations layered upon one another like geological stratification. But today’s Istanbul is also something else: a metropolis of twenty million people living under mounting political pressure, where young people breathe art as if it were a matter of survival. It is from this melting pot that Lalalar emerges. Not as an export product, but as an urgent cry from within.

The name is in itself a declaration of intent: lala was, in the days of the Ottoman Empire, the tutor of princes. The wisest man at court. But in modern Turkish, the word has also taken on the opposite meaning: the clown, the fool, the one who takes nothing seriously. Lalalar lives precisely in this tension between the sage and the jester, between the archive and subversion. Formed in 2019 by Ali Güçlü Şimşek, Barlas Tan Özemek and Alican İpek, three veteran musicians from the Istanbul scene, the band arrived late to the party, but arrived with a bang: with the maturity of those who already know what they mean and the impatience of those who have no time to waste.

In 2022, their debut album Bi Cinnete Bakar (‘On the Brink of Madness’) propels them onto the European radar with a force no one expected. The Swiss label Les Disques Bongo Joe, the same one that hosts such diverse voices as Meridian Brothers or Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, immediately recognises what it has on its hands: something that doesn’t fit on any shelf. In 2023, En Kötü İyi Olur (‘In the Worst Case, It’ll Turn Out Fine’) fulfils the promise and expands the vocabulary: lyrics about politics, rebellion, narcissistic personalities, love triangles and the eternal struggle against the hypocrisy of power.

Lalalar don’t practise fusion in the touristy sense of the word. What they do is stranger and more honest: they delve into Anatolia’s legacy—the saz, ancient polyrhythms, the legacy of 1970s Turkish psychedelia. They run it through the high-voltage current of punk, industrial electronica, funk and 1980s new wave. The result is bewildering and irresistible: cinematic, hypnotic, fat basslines; dirty, electric beats; guitars that coil like snakes, sounding at times like surf music, at others like Anatolian rock; samples that give a nod to both old Turkish cinema and video game culture.

The vocals are at times declamatory, almost rap-like, at others hypnotic and repetitive, creating slogans and images that stick in the memory. The songs are constructed like collages, full of snippets, effects and abrupt cuts, yet there is always a rhythmic thread that keeps the body moving. It is music that respects the song but thinks like a DJ: always on the lookout for the next surge of energy.

Omar And the Eastern Power

(MA/EG/KR)

South Korea is the last place one would expect to find the blues of the Sahara Desert and the spiritual gnawa music of North Africa. But the 21st century is full of such beautiful ironies. In a world where globalisation breaks down borders whilst politics rebuilds them, there are musicians who choose to live precisely in the space between these two movements: inhabiting countries that are not their own, singing in languages other than those of their childhood, turning the migrant experience not into a problem, but into a language. Omar Benassila arrived in Seoul from Morocco. The drummer Zaky Wael came from Egypt. The Korean members grew up on the other side of the world.

It all began in Jeju, the volcanic island in the south of Korea, known for its lava fields, its female fishing divers and its constant wind. It was on this unlikely island, in a small fisherman’s cottage, that Omar Benassila settled in 2015 to write songs. He had arrived in Korea a decade earlier, becoming part of the live music scene in Seoul’s Hongik district, playing jazz, rock and classical music with Korean musicians, and taking part in artist residencies. In Jeju, he found the tranquillity needed to hear what he had to say: something that evoked the Sahel, Morocco, gnawa trance and the Sahara desert. He shared the songs with Zaky Wael, the Egyptian percussionist living in Seoul. Wael fell in love with them immediately. Two Korean musicians joined them: Oh Jin-woo on guitar and Tehiun on bass. The band formed in 2016, with a name that is, in itself, a statement of identity: Omar and the Eastern Power.

The music of Omar and the Eastern Power is what happens when nostalgia for the desert meets the percussion of the Nile, both filtered through Korean musical sensibility: disciplined, precise, with a deep connection to rhythm rooted in millennia-old traditions. Moroccan gnawa blues provides the trance and spirituality; afrobeat provides the groove and collective energy; dub creates space and silence; psychedelic rock makes everything explode when needed. The lyrics, written by Omar, are chronicles of migrant life. Joy and sorrow, hard work and love, longing and the wonder of discovering that the world fits into a song. Omar himself summed it up perfectly:‘We believe that music is one. And genres and styles are a bit like borders between countries. That’s why we try to go beyond them.’

In a fragmented world, Omar and the Eastern Power unite the Maghreb, the Nile and the Far East in an irresistible dance.

calle mambo

(CL)

Calle Mambo emerged in 2013 on the freezing streets of Munich, when Chilean musicians, including singer Jhon Valle, guitarist Erkki Nylund, Guillaume Laumière on the charango and Jankely Felix on percussion, got together to play on the street. Migrant musicians seeking both a livelihood and a sense of belonging. The name came about as a joke: ‘mambo na calle’, capturing the spontaneous, street-wise spirit that has defined them from the start.

The starting point is the immense richness of Latin American folk music. Not just the most internationally renowned genres, but those that globalisation has pushed to the margins: the huayno of the Peruvian Andes, the Bolivian caporal, the Cuban timba, and the Colombian and Chilean cumbiain their many dialects. It is upon these roots that Calle Mambo fuses electronica, rap and contemporary beats, and the result is what the band has dubbed ‘electro-urban folklor’: a language that bridges generations without betraying any of them.

Inspired by pioneers such as Celso Piña, who revolutionised cumbia with hip-hop and rock energy, they have recorded albums such as their 2015 self-titled album, Electro Pachamámico (2020) and the recent Retumba la Tierra(2025).

Their instrumental arsenal is, in itself, a statement of intent. On stage, Calle Mambo plays over ten instruments, including the quena, quenacho, charango, ronroco, zampoña, Colombian gaita, Venezuelan cuatro, tiple, timbales, synthesizers and electronic percussion. Each track is a journey that begins in the Andes and ends on the dance floor. The lyrics are every bit as powerful as the sound. They speak of forced migration, the destruction of ecosystems, oppression and resilience.

Calle Mambo arrive at MED with the vigour of a band on a continuous tour and with the most mature repertoire of their career, with the energy of those who feel an urgency to communicate not just rhythms, but memories, territories and identities that resist oblivion.