FESTIVAL SPOTLIGHT: OUT.FEST
For a week, the city of Barreiro, in Portugal, becomes the symbol of absolute musical freedom.
You might have never heard of it, and that’s fine, because we’re talking about a delightfully weird festival, dedicated to supremely weird and out-there music (“exploratory music”, as they often call it), that takes place in a Portuguese city (Barreiro) that is situated on the other side of the river from Lisboa. But the fact is that OUT.FEST has been doing its own fantastic thing for twenty years now, so it feels appropriate that in this commemorative edition, we give it a little bit of proper attention.
First of all, look at that bill up there. Do you know any of those bands? Again, it’s fine to admit that you don’t know a great deal of them. Hell, I’m from here, I’ve followed the event for several years, I like to pride myself as a conoisseur of strange stuff - it’s the only sort of talent that I really have, so I like to cultivate it as well as I can -, and even I have trouble recognising most of them. Herein lies the first gate to go through on your way to the mind-bending wonderland of OUT.FEST: you have to be prepared to be surprised. This isn’t the kind of festival you go to in order to see all your old favourites and whistle and sing along all your favourite tunes. Not only there aren’t any whistlable or sing along-able tunes in many of these shows, but the whole point here is discovery. The Wire called it “a dizzying mix of experimental rock, jazz, club sounds and composition from all over Portugal and across the globe,” and to add to that very accurate and efficient description I’d suggest you imagine it like a smaller-scale kind of Le Guess Who?, not only in open-mindedness and international appeal, but even in the way that shows are scattered throughout several venues across its home city - including some free shows, and by “venues” also read places like churches, a library, a jazz school and the town’s main square -, and you’re kinda halfway there. If you’d like to know more about the festival and its history, the perfect opportunity is here, as they’ve just launched a brilliant book to signal this special anniversary - check it out here.
So, put on your adventurer’s hat, and join us on the lively chat we had with Rui Pedro Dãmaso, one of the organisers, after the jump.
You can find all the info you need about OUT.FEST on their very cool website.
“After twenty years, without us ever imagining it, there is in Barreiro (in Barreiro!) a space of discovery, a meeting point for incentive, pride and communion, made of music that would never be collectively listened to in any other way in Portugal, built out of an absence of headliners and counting on the availability of a few thousand people to come to a festival where they probably don’t know even a third of the bill.”
— Rui Pedro Dâmaso, OUT.RA - Associação Cultural
Is it even possible to ask you for a brief presentation of OUT.FEST for anyone less familiar with it? OUT.FEST for dummies, kindathing?
Rui Pedro Dâmaso: It’s hard. Many formulations of that have been tried throughout all these year, I believe. It’s a festival of diverse music made by people who love music of all genres. But bear in mind that it’s far from that “oh, I listen to a bit of everything” thing - I think most people who say that aren’t even close to dreaming of the existence of several kinds of music. We’ve also tried stuff like “the alternative to alternative music” - which can work in a way (can it??). Other attempts: a contemporary music festival that shies away from the highbrow protocols; a world music festival where you can dance only inside your head; a noise festival with a maximum of 10% bearded dudes in the audience; a festival where you can see jazz, electronics, metal and folk in the same day and it all seems natural to you; a festival where you can see jazz, electronics, metal and folk that jazz, electronics, metal and folk purists are not going to like; a festival where a punk band showcases their take on classical music and where the guy from the music conservatory plugs in distortion and only plays two notes; a festival where you get emotional listening to something you had never heard before.
Aside all of this, it’s essential to know that OUT.FEST exists in Barreiro and that’s an undeniable fact - coming to OUT.FEST will make you visit community centres, old fire stations, churches, theatres inside shopping malls, warehouses, and it will make you experience the city in a different way of all the other city experiences, even when they are similar. This is valid both for locals and for people visiting from other places. It’s a part of it. It’s “another music, another place.”
Looking back, how do you see the growth of the festival? From the outside, it seems like a very balanced process, with no “leaps bigger than your legs” as the Portuguese expression goes always keeping yourselves very grounded to your basic principles. Is this what you feel as well? Has there been any year that you feel has been particularly decisive for any reason?
Rui: Looking back is an exercise we make almost constantly, it’s inevitable. This year, with the 20th anniversary, we have been doing it even more frequently and in a more focused way - and the truth is that conclusions change, the past keeps being built and rebuilt. You mentioned basic principles, and we tell you that we never had them; or rather, that they built themselves over time, or we built them over time. In the beginning it was Love for Music, the will to be part of an “outsider” music circuit (that’s how we felt them, perhaps) that appeared in Portugal, connected to a process of aesthetic and existential discoveries we were going through, connected to making music, discovering other music, an absolutely unmeasured and non-calculating enthusiasm about the idea of putting a festival together, of owning a record label (Searching Records was founded on the first day of the first OUT.FEST and put out a dozen or so CDs and tapes up until 2008, thereabouts).
In the meantime, we realised the enthusiasm about the musical discoveries also became an enthusiasm about the discovery of Barreiro (first, for ourselve, as we wandered the city for many years aimlessly, eyes set on urban phenomena, architectural, historical and social, that built our relationship with it, and then for other barreirenses and visitors that we had). We started to realise that this festival of weird music had a poetic parallel with this half-forgotten town, somewhat injusticed, very depressed by so rich in so many aspects, so Itself.
Then there was a point during which we managed to get institutional support that made us understand that what we were doing was valuable from a public service point of view, that there was a set of responsibilities that, though we didn’t even dream of them before, we could assume and develop; there was a landmark year where that support disappeared but the responsabilities were already there, and the inital Love remained - we could have stopped there and let history remain as a footnote, but we decided to carry on and I’m glad we did.
Then, a few years later, there was a new opening for diversity and for ways of including Barreiro in the festival, and in this stage of reflection, I really think those years of 2018 and 2019 were decisive for us to be here today; the step in quality was big, and although intuitive, I think it was informed by this permanent reflection and this always-in-construction mode we have.
If this growth is sustained and sustainable? Yes, from the social and cultural standpoints we really believe that it is. From the economic standpoint, no. There are needs that can’t pay themselves or be profitable, but they’re still necessary and they still have an important contribution for people and for communities - after twenty years, without us ever imagining it, there is in Barreiro (in Barreiro!) a space of discovery, a meeting point for incentive, pride and communion, made of music that would never be collectively listened to in any other way in Portugal, built out of an absence of headliners and counting on the availability of a few thousand people to come to a festival where they probably don’t know even a third of the bill. What this all means is that this permanent construction of the past is connected to the responsibility of continuing to do better, to challenge ourselves, and to the need of being able to identify other key moments in our history’s evolution in another twenty years’ time.
The Barreiro connection seems absolutely umbilical and imtimate. Could there be an OUT.FEST without Barreiro, in your mind? Or is this an intrinsically barreirense manifestation?
Rui: I would say it is intrinsically barreirense in the way that, for starters, we, the ones who make the festival, are from Barreiro. But I think this by itself doesn’t really mean almost anything, there are many ways of being from a place, culture is not a homogeneous thing. I think we are a specific type of barreirense, a curious type, that grew up embracing the city for what it is and not necessarily for what it could be (that’s another type of barreirense, always looking at the city that isn’t there yet), fascinated by its incongruence, its decadence (this is mainly growing up in ‘80s and ‘90s Barreiro), but also an incredible DIY vibe, dozens of meeting places where you could lose yourself listening and talking. The festival itself, well… for us it was natural to have OUT.FEST in the real Barreiro and not that Barreiro-to-come, because either it never comes, or when it does, it will be different from what you dreamed of - this means that to have concerts, you have the organisations, so you go to them, you have churches, so you go to churches, you have the industrial area, etc. I think the most intrinsically barreirense thing we have and OUT.FEST has is a certain pride in showing thing how they are, in the light of how we’ve lived them - a lived-in city is always more interesting than a city decorated to receive visitors.
Your lineups are always a surprise, and I doubt anyone can tell they know all the artists you have over, year after year. How is your recruitment process like, what makes an artist OUT.FESTable? Do you go after specific stuff (wishlists?) or do you mostly pay attention to opportunities that arise?
Rui: It’s a struggle. There’s three people in the programming nucleus – Rui Dâmaso, Vítor Lopes and Nelson Gomes (Nelson is from Filho Único) – and we all have different personalities and very unique tastes, despite of course a wide common agreement on many things and a lot of rapport. The process is a mix of the things you asked. There are wishlists, we are open to opportunities, and fortunately (even if it makes everything more difficult) there is a gigantic universe of music that interests us and that potentially can fit OUT.FEST. What many probably aren’t aware of is that this process takes months, during which an edition can seem to go one way and then it goes in another different way entirely, as opportunities appear and disappear of bringing this or that artist - who we bring is almost always such an idiosyncratic thing that their presence or absence doesn’t by itself completely change the character of each programme, year after year. It’s always a struggle and a plan that rebuilds itself continuously.
Tell us a bit about this year’s edition. Was there any specific plan at all initially, any kind of vibe, and could you maintain it, or did it change completely halfway too? And would you like to mention any specific name on the bill?
Rui: There was the plan of making an “out of time edition”, whatever that is. Those are my words from last year and I probably still don’t understand what I meant by them; but when you get to two decades of this and you realise you’re still not comfortable, that you still want to try doing thing in other ways, you end up saying stuff like this. I think this edition is not that much out of time, from the point of view of the model and design of the festival, which is similar to what we did in the last few year, but I think it’s a precursor for some radical changes that will come in the future - we’ll see. But the vibe is, of course, particularly celebratory - more than any names on the bill, I would like to mention the book, which in my opinion is an interesting reflection on what our evolution has been. I’d like to mention the opening show because it has been our ambition to bring these special musicians (i.e., Os Heróis Indianos Romanos Africanos) to OUT.FEST for a long time, and I’d also like to signal the shows on Sunday, Oct. 6th, which is the day that for us is really the anniversary party day - there might be cake.
How do you look at the overall panorama of “exploratory music”, as you so aptly call it, in the last few year? With so many people constantly claiming the death of genres and that nothing new is being done, you guys are a beacon that every year contradicts those poisoned opinions. What about in Portuguese terms, is the country’s weirdo underground healthy?
Rui: That’s a complex question that would demand a lot of time and pages to get a proper answer. This “exploratory music” thing doesn’t mean much - we tried for it to be as broad as possible of a description so we didn’t have to use labels, but like with everything about language, it runs the risk of ending up as just another pigeonhole. We don’t really listen to “exploratory music” or program “exploratory music” - we listen to and we love Music, and within this wide world we try to bring to OUT.FEST what we think is interesting, regarding the constantly changing boundaries we build for ourselves. If you look at the programmes for the last, say, ten years, you’ll easily be able to see that more diverse music can still fit at the festival - and more will come, whether they already exist or will still be made.
So, trying to say something that really answers your question: the “panorama” is rich, and it’s rich because it’s constantly widening in several directions; there are past things that only now are reaching our ears, there are a million present things that are slowly pushing their heads out of the ground coming from total obscurity, there’s also a sort of exploratory “canon” that is important to listen to and to think about with many pinches of salt to understand if it’s just fruit of the season. There are scenes from which you don’t expect to hear anything particularly original that end up surprising you year after year. YOU CAN’T LISTEN TO EVERYTHING! This is one of my great laments. I grew up during a time with less access, but also because of that, with the luxury of being able to listen to the same record 100 times in a month - now it’s much harder, and also because of that this joining of the love for music with the discovery of new music, with the healthy obsession of repeating, repeating, repeating the listening of what hits you hard to exhaustion is a big challenge when it comes to programming.
In Portugal: a lot of interesting people keep appearing, I actually think it’s a miracle that a country with so few people has so much valuable music that doesn’t care if it sounds like this or that, though it coexists in a sea of “well made” music, constantly better made, that gives you less emotion than a glass of fruit salts. As it happens in the rest of the world, in fact - we have reached it finally, the first world.
How do you look at the future of OUT.FEST? To continue existing while it’s possible? Is it possible to grow more, in any way, while keeping the vibe that you have?
Rui: Another twenty years would be good. I don’t know how or in what form - OUT.FEST, just like it happens now, is very close to a certain kind of ceiling. We can comfortably manage this limit - but I don’t believe we’ll know how to do it, we hate comfort. To grow beyond, the festival will have to reinvent itself, which has been a constant anyway. I don’t think we can abandon the vibe or the values that you’ve mentioned, because we wouldn’t even know how to. Everything is open right now, and it wouldn’t make sense for it to be any other way.
