My mate Mikey Sibson, who I first met at a most excellent Elevator East party, has moved to Lisbon. There, he’s formed a couple of musical duos – Slower Than Goa and Cor Parecida – and begun to host events under the banner Comandante. This activity recently also span off into a record label, whose first release – remixes of the psyche rock band, pot-pot – made the cut last month’s Looking For The Balearic Beat. The second is an E.P. from multi-discipline artist / renaissance man, Georges Silver, entitled Asteroides. The 5 tracks mix live percussion and electronics, and range from an opening ceremonial march, to introspective IDM, a tumbling tom-tom free-jazz battery and booming acid house / techno. Plus there’s a Laraaji cover that hits like a lost sultry, shuffling Spanish / Catalan pop treasure. Perhaps influenced by 80s Portuguese post-punkers Ban. Its dubbed, smashed snares giving off waves of echoes that wash like Mediterranean surf. Here, Mr. Sibson shares a short update on what he and Comandante have been up to. 

Wonderful words by Mikey Sibson.

I moved to Lisbon during the endless void years of the pandemic, between stints in Berlin and London, and I haven’t really left. That was 3 or so years ago. I’ve been getting to know the musical landscape here, setting up my own little studio, meeting lots of new people, playing records, and throwing parties in warehouses. I’ve also set up a record label, both under the banner, Comandante. The idea being to build a platform for the many talented musicians based in Portugal who are also into this kind of headsy leftfield dance / experimental sound.

The first release came out late last month, and there’s a limited run of 20 white labels which will be shipping sometime in January. It’s three remixes of a band called pôt-pot. They’ve done three records themselves; the first is four brooding kraut tracks all on a single note – ‘A’, the second more of a Velvet Underground / Brian Jonestown Massacre garage jangle, and the third, as yet unreleased record, sits somewhere in the middle.

I reworked a track from each, with the idea of them fitting snugly on the Comandante dancefloor, and two of those remixes are now available digitally, and on a limited vinyl record. 

COM002 is quite different, this EP is called Asteróide, by a guy called George Silver, who’s a prodigious, prolific denizen of the Portuguese underground. He’s from an ex-industrial town called Barreiro over the river from Lisbon, and a man of many monikers and many talents. Definitely look into his label Panama Papers; almost all the ‘artists’ that have released on that label are pseudonyms for George Silver. He’ll be looked back on as one of the most interesting artists in Portugal during this period, I’m sure. 

Anyway, Asteróide is more of a leftfield experimental kinda trip, that soundtracks a book that he’s written, which is a meditation on art and love through the eyes of an asteroid on Earth. The idea is that all humans are asteroids, and we smash into each other and break each other into thousands of pieces and form again as new asteroids. There’s one track on the E.P. called De Repente, which is an emotional Balearic-esque dubbed-out Portuguese language version of Laraaji‘s All Of A Sudden, which I’m in love with. I think a lot of people might like it too.

There are a lot of really fucking cool things happening up and down Portugal at the moment. However, unfortunately, the country is simultaneously battling a severe housing / cost of living crisis, triggered by massively inflated rents due to:

1. The abundance of tourist apartments (something like 15% of housing stock in Lisbon is Airbnb)

2. Huge interest from foreign speculators all around the country, but especially Lisbon and Porto

3. A massive amount of abandoned buildings in the city

(1 and 2 are a global concern – vastly inflating the price of the basic human need for shelter, for no other reason than greed – Rob)

This has meant that more and more venues and collectively-run associations have been forced to close, as their landlords decide that the space would be put to better use as boutique hotels or apartments. In December we lost Lounge, for example, which has been open almost every night, until 4am, for 25 years. It was a legendary place where many many DJs – across generations – learned to cut their teeth in a difficult but always busy room. Some of the residents in Lounge had been playing weekly for as long as the club had been open.

I’m a member of a cultural association called Arroz Estúdios, based in a converted warehouse by the docks on the more industrial east side of town. Arroz has a main 400-500 capicity ‘warehouse’ space for late-night events on the weekend, a courtyard which is great for live music in the summer, and 8 or 9 artist studios housing producers, painters, photographers, people building soundsystems… That’s where my own production studio is, and it’s where we’ve thrown three Comandante parties. On New Year’s Eve we also curated Arroz’s Room 2: smaller, 100 capicity, red light, loads of smoke, immersive dancing until the morning. It was truly wonderful. The place now feels very much like an artistic home for me.

Arroz, like many other cultural associations, is also under threat of closure; recently a major fast food chain moved in to buy the entire space from the landlord, which has been postponed for now only because of works happening nearby. We’re currently looking for a new space. 

The first Comandante party was in a newly converted warehouse space by the airport in Lisbon in November 2023, a kind of ‘leap of faith’ from myself in a foreign city trying to fill a 500-cap venue alone. I didn’t get 500 people, and I did lose out a fair bit financially, but for those who came it was a very special night – a lot of people told me that they were so happy to finally go to an electronic / dance music night with a very eclectic spirit – plus a kind of punkesque attitude – rather than it just being the same house, techno or kuduro all night. Stylistically, it was Tia Cousin‘s set that night that seemed to sum up the ethos of Comandante very well: she cruised between EBM, Chicago house rollers, face-melting Italo and stomping Idjut-style percussive tracks, with a very ‘rock & roll’ attitude. It was a command to dance, or an invitation to… come and dance. 

Also, the soundsystem was incredible, and we put a lot of effort into making the space very immersive and ‘incognito’ – lots of smoke, strobes and lasers, which is something I often find missing in Portuguese night spaces but is always a staple of Comandante. 

After that, I moved proceedings to Arroz, formed a duo with local DJ Mariana Raposo called Slower Than Goa, and we became de facto residents for the next three parties, which took place in Feb, June and September of last year. The format is always roughly the same: 6 hours of immersive dance music, usually starting at midnight and running until 6am, with at least one live act, and usually at least one DJ from abroad; so far all invites – Tia Cousins, ddwy, Kiara Scuro, Stella Z – have been from the UK. 

We also did a couple of Comandante showcases at Passos Manuel in Porto, one in August, one in January. The last one featured a live performance of Asteróide, with George on drumkit and electronics. I did a show with pôt-pot in the basement of a ‘horizontal, autonomous, anti-authoritarian social centre’ in Lisbon, called disgraça. They’re also facing closure. I played as part of Cor Parecida, which is me and another DJ called Epanépia. Mariana and I went also to Berlin in November; we did a Slower Than Goa stream at Sameheads, and played for an event Orbita at the Lighthouse. It was a Sunday day-time party with Piers Harrison, Telephones and the Orbita residents, and it was loads of fun.

The parties have been growing steadily, and at the last one in September we had about 300 people. That one was a slightly different format as it was the launch of Comandante Discos, with 8 DJs doing ‘surprise’ back-to-back pairings throughout the night, a midnight live set from pôt-pot, and a DJ set from local three-piece psych / kraut heroes Máquina who arrived straight from playing a festival in Sintra to do the closing set at Comandante. The idea was to launch the pót-pot remix EP straight after that party, but alas due to various delays it took until the end of December to get that out. 

COM001 and COM002 are both now up on Bandcamp. I’ll be giving the parties a rest for a while, maybe until spring, to focus on bringing out more records. 

You can find more info about Comandate via Instagram. RA have a list of their past and upcoming events. You can check out the label on Bandcamp.