FESTIVAL SPOTLIGHT: Comendatio Music Fest
The Portuguese town of Tomar becomes a haven for heavy prog lovers every year.
This one is easy to “sell”, even if you’ve never heard of the event before. Comendatio Music Fest is now on its fifth edition under that name (it started out as a little one-day metal fest, as you will discover in the interview below), it has been steadily growing at each step, and it is now starting to feel like a perfect place to come and unwind by watching, erm, quite complex and hard-to-digest music. That’s right, Comendatio isn’t your run of the mill everything-fits kind of festival, it has carefully curated a direction leaning heavily towards the progressive, the atmospheric and the more modern sounds like djent and its associated subgenres. It might feel like a niche, especially for the older and more cynical among us, but as some of the bigger bands and festivals of this style have proved, there is a massive audience for this sort of thing, and an even more massive potential for growth, given the envelope-pushing nature of most of the artists involved.
Comendatio Music Fest, which takes place at Paço da Comenda, in the historical Portuguese city of Tomar (all you Knights Templar nerds will recognise it for sure), sits comfortably between worlds and offers a very cool balance to anyone seeking to try out something new. It’s not a huge 50.000+ festival with all the hassle that usually comes with it (so you get ample camping space, proper hotel/hostel accomodation close by if you prefer, cheap prices), it offers a chilled, family atmosphere where artists, staff and crowd move freely among each other, it’ll get you into a bunch of up-and-coming bands that you might now know before, but you still get a couple of big highlights that will justify your trip fully. TessaracT, Haken or The Ocean have all visited the event in years past, and while this year the biggest name on offer is obviously the legendary Ihsahn (our guest on episode #128 of the podcast, if you recall), perhaps the most important artist to ever play at Comendatio, but acts like Vola, Humanity’s Last Breath, Oceans Ate Alaska and more are also fine excuses to move your butt and land in Tomar for two days.
We talked to Arlindo Cardoso, one of the main members of the organization, it was a very cool chat and you can read it below to discover all about this very promising festival.
Comendatio Music Fest takes place at Paço da Comenda, in Tomar, on June 21/22.
Daily bill:
June 21 - Ihsahn, Oceans Ate Alaska, The Cost (world premiere), Killus, Equaleft, Yokovich, Crimson Bridge
June 22 - VOLA, Humanity's Last Breath, AVKRVST, The Broken Horizon, Lysergic, Phase Transition, Above The Ocean
You can get tickets and all useful info from www.comendatio.com.
“There is already a sizeable community that comes every year, and first-timers can feel that as soon as they get there, everyone immediately feels at home, in the middle of family.“
— Arlindo Cardoso
What are the origins of the festival?
Arlindo Cardoso: The first idea goes back to 2017. At the time, José Narciso, who is the oldest member of our production team – he doesn’t look like it if you see him in person, but he is! –, he talked directly to me at the time, saying he’d like to go back to producing something locally. He put on some events in the ‘90s that went really well around this area, I remember a few myself because I was a teenager at the time and I went to some of them myself. His professional life didn’t allow him to keep doing this sort of thing, but he’s always wanted to return to this scene, so he talked to me in 2017 because I’m always involved with bands and stuff, to help him out. We put together a one-day metal festival back then, called Comendatio Metal Fest, with a few Portuguese bands, and we repeated it in 2018. That year we had Bizarra Locomotiva as headliners, also Toxikull, For The Glory, Speedemon and a few other important bands. That year was pretty good, so we decided to try to do something with foreign bands in 2019. I have a connection with Daniel Cardoso from a few years back, and that was when we invited him to be part of the team, in an attempt to start bringing bands that were a little bit bigger, more international, to try and spread the word about the festival a bit further. That’s also when we decided to change the name of the festival to something a little more open, to Comendatio Music Fest, and go on this path of prog, djent and the more modern sort of sounds, within the post, ambient and related genres. There are a lot of excellent festivals in Portugal, but there was nothing that catered to this direction specifically, so that was our bet, and it’s been going pretty well. Of course we had to stop because of the pandemic, but we returned in 2022 and have been going strong and growing ever since.
That was the first outdoor edition too, wasn’t it?
Arlindo: Yeah, the indoor venue where we used to do it was reaching its limit, even when it wasn’t as hot as usual during the festival weekend, it was already pretty warm in there, no matter how we tried to ventilate it. So with the pandemic, we had time to prepare the conditions to bring the festival outside, and that’s what we’ve been doing since, and it’s been great.
What led to this specific musical direction, was it something you had thought about before you made that decision?
Arlindo: To be honest, we didn’t have anything that well defined before. When we were looking for possibilities to headline the festival in 2019, the first names we would have liked weren’t available, and that led to us starting to think about doing something different, going into a market that was less explored in Portugal. We have a lot of metal fests here, and they are quality events too. We could try to be one more, and there would be nothing wrong with that, but I think it’s healthy to have a more diversified approach. So it wasn’t premeditated, but it was an idea that came from the difficulties in putting together a more “conventional” bill. When we booked TesseracT, we realised that going this way was a real possibility so we started to orient the bill that way since then.
Have you ever felt it as a limitation? How do you balance the advantages and disadvantages of having a prog/djent/post-stuff festival, to put it that way?
Arlindo: I admit that we never did see it as a disadvantage. It could have happened, there could have been the opportunity of getting a cool band that we might think wouldn’t fit, or something like that, but… so far we have never been in that position. But we are well aware that there are added difficulties to keeping things within this stylistic world. That’s why it’s important to remain open-minded about it. It’s normal to find a band or two on each year’s bill that is heavier or more extreme, or on the other hand to have artists that have a more atmospheric kind of sound, not so heavy, not so riff-based as a lot of us are used to, but I think that’s good, to maintain some flexibility. That’s why we adopted Music Fest in the name, so we don’t label anything so specifically. It’s pretty open.
How do you think the event has grown over the years, what are the main signs?
Arlindo: One good thing is that we seem to have a faithful audience already. There is already a sizeable community that comes every year, and first-timers can feel that as soon as they get there, everyone immediately feels at home, in the middle of family. It’s normal even for musicians to hang out with the crowd and for everyone to be together at the bar just enjoying themselves with no divisions, that’s one of the things that has set the festival apart from many others. There isn’t that pressure of being stuck in a crowd with no space to move, of just being a number, just another one who bought a ticket. It’s a pleasant and very open space to be in. There are couples who have met each other at the festival, stuff like that. A little history that we’re building with our community, and I think that is one of the most important things that we can have at an event like this.
How is the relationship with the city of Tomar? Is it symbiotic, can you imagine Comendatio happening anywhere else?
Arlindo: I think it makes a lot of sense for the festival to be here, considering everything that is being built around it. I think changing the place would change its character and its very concept. I do think we could have done something similar anywhere, but not with the same name and not with the personality this has acquired over the years. It would be like taking the Vilar de Mouros festival out of Vilar de Mouros, right? It’s another dimension, but just to illustrate. I think once this connection is established, the place and everything around it becomes special, and the event absorbs everything, it’s not just about the music, but about the space where it all happens, the people, everything.
Have the locals reacted well over the years?
Arlindo: You know how it is in small towns, right? There’s always a lot of stories and some caution when a festival like this appears. But that’s how it goes. First they think it’s weird, but then they get used to it. Local people were very impressed in the first editions with how civic and educated the festival crowd was. We metal people get a bad rep sometimes, but we are generally cool people, we like order, we don’t leave a mess, we don’t create trouble and people are surprised by that. How do these guys, dressed in black, big beards, chains and all of those things that initially scare people, come here and then they are super nice, they talk to people from the cafes and the shops, they leave everything clean… On our camping site, for example, there isn’t one cigarette butt on the ground once everyone leaves, it’s pristine. People really react to these things, and after a couple of years of getting used to it, they actually start looking forward to the festival. They also realise that it’s a great thing for local businesses, they only have advantages over this happening in their town, and all the problems they could have anticipated don’t exist. People end up making friends even! There’s a little joint here called Nofre where they sell a very well known local drink called Superfresco. There’s people who now come from the north of the country just to go to Nofre and get Superfresco and take pictures there, because they discovered it at the festival. People would come from the north to see shows in Lisboa, for instance, and they would stop by Paço da Comenda just to go see Mr. Nofre and get a Superfresco, it’s awesome to create those connections.
There always seems to be a good mix between established and up-and-coming bands, as well as between foreign bands and local talent. I suppose this is a balance that you strive to maintain.
Arlindo: Yeah, and we also have an online contest, a “battle of bands”, and the winners also play the festival, those spots belong to Crimson Bridge and Above The Ocean this year. We also have Phase Transition who came to the festival in 2023 for the first time via the contest, and have now earned their spot for this year as well, given how much they have grown in the meantime. But yeah, we always try to have four or five really strong names, both the headliners and the co-headliners are usually bands with international experience. Then we get some emerging names from the international scene and we mix them with what we feel are some of the most promising local acts, as well as some established Portuguese bands, like Equaleft who are playing this year but can already be considered old school. We love doing it like this and we feel it’s important to keep showing everyone that we have excellent bands and musicians over here who might not be as well known as some others but deserve all the support. And I think people recognise that.
What do you see in your crystal ball for the future growth of the festival?
Arlindo: We would like for the festival to become bigger than it is, basically. We did manage to give it a big boost last year already, even with a difficult context for live music which has been really strange since the pandemic. But our idea is to keep growing and be able to bring the biggest names in the international prog scene. I’m thinking of bands like Karnivool, for example, that our fans keep asking for but we haven’t been able to bring them yet, or even bands like Opeth or Meshuggah, which are very hard to get but are considered leaders and big names within these genres, so they are within our ambitions. However, as ambitious as we are, we are careful and we take it one step at a time. We don’t want to “take a step bigger than our leg”, as the Portuguese saying goes, because that could question the existence of the entire festival. We will keep growing in a sustained and rational way.
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