“The image that has been created around the place is highly unfair,” Lopes says of the hard-luck community captured in the Netflix series. Still, there’s a feeling that islanders are long looked down upon by mainlanders, which, paired with poverty and social exclusion from the rest of Portugal, can lead to a sense of low self-esteem as a community. Celebrating their traditions, then, is a necessary correction. “It brings a sense of pride to these people and tells them, ‘No, what we do is cool. We’re not only poor and miserable and stigmatized; we have value that can be shared and celebrated.’” To unite local amateur musicians with the festival’s cosmopolitan demographic, Lopes says, “is really about that tremor—the shivering, the vibration, but also the possibilities of intersecting different worlds, different customs.”
Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore knows that shivering feeling intimately. He first traveled to the Azores for an artistic residency and was so inspired that he wrote a poem called “Rabo de Peixe.” “You really feel you’re in a safe space of wild nature while the rest of the world deals with their foolish warmongering,” he said, calling the islands “a remarkable place to contemplate our responsibilities in allowing the planet to heal.”
Tremor’s decade-long run is helping to foster a growing list of Azorean artists of note, many of whom are repeat performers. Under the alias O Experimentar Na M’Incomoda, Pedro Lucas started out filtering the oral history of the Azores into experimental electronic music before going on to record three albums alongside José Medeiros (a.k.a. Zeca), a septuagenarian singer-songwriter and film director (sometimes known as the Tom Waits of the Azores, for his gravelly voice) who first illuminated the Azorean experience for the broader Portuguese public. Today, as P.S. Lucas, he makes elegant, literary indie rock in the vein of the National. And São Miguel’s PMDS, the duo of Pedro Sousa and Filipe Caetano, recorded their new album, Música Para Miradouros, in outdoor locations on São Miguel, tapping into the same fusion of sound and landscape that fuels Terra Incógnita. Still, despite the archipelago’s cultural renaissance, they caution that, when it comes to the local scene, “gigging is difficult and resources are scarce.”
