Welcome to the first “Portuguese brat summer”
But the energy that would make the best raves jealous didn't just reach Primavera Sound Porto because of the headline act on the first day. It's clear that electronic music is gaining ground at the festival, which this year has an extra day, Sunday, dedicated specifically to electronic music. What's more, the event, which is an after-hours event, will continue into the night for the first time in venues such as Edifício Transparente, Pérola Negra and Indulgent.
Returning to the Parque da Cidade grounds, which at 6:30 pm, three hours after the doors opened, were already filling up. Some were immersed in the unique and mysterious atmospheres of Surma, at Super Bock, others were lost in the introspection of Californian Christian Lee Hutson, at Vodafone, but many were sweating hypnotized beyond the black walls of an enigmatic black cube.
How is it possible that a venue that doesn't even appear on the festival's website's general schedule is packed with people? The new stage, named after the sponsoring car brand, Cupra, has a programme curated by emerging talents from electronic and urban music, and at the start of the first day, it was the one that attracted the most people in the under-30 category.
Runnan opened the hostilities on the packed dance floor, in contrast to the sparse crowd in the vast green meadow of Parque da Cidade. For about two hours, the Brazilian DJ and producer, co-founder of two queer events in Porto, Lombra and Bunda em Brasa, was unstoppable in the booth, with her fan raised, imbuing techno with the energy of a funk dance party. People danced as if it were not six in the afternoon, but six in the morning.
At Cupra, every body gave everything it had as if the world was going to end tomorrow, a feeling similar to what would happen on the Vodafone stage, shortly after ten o'clock at night. The atmosphere was completely different, but the finality was the same.
Anohni, dressed to the feet, appeared on stage white and beautiful, just like a dead coral reef. “I'm dying now ,” she and her children inside her sing in Manta Ray . And if her voice (what a voice!) wasn't enough to convey the environmental urgency of her message, there was the testimony of scientists she spoke to on her last visit to Australia, to document the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef and mourn it, to corroborate her.
Mourning the Great Barrier Reef is precisely the name of the show that Anohni and The Johnsons brought to Primavera Sound Porto, a festival they performed at 10 years ago, when Anohni was still Anthony. At that time, all the stages stopped so that silence would prevail. Tonight, there was no need to decree any suspension: the audience, with their feet firmly on the grass, leaving only their bodies swaying like seaweed in the current, silence fell, the bottom of the sea became.
For almost an hour, Anohni sang our eulogy. She wept over the death of the corals and our own death, while on the giant screen behind her, images of the reef were shown, the ones she had documented with a group of filmmakers and marine biologists. She wept like a coral about to die, giving off its most beautiful and bright light before bleaching due to heat stress.
In 4 degrees, the spotlights dyed Anohni's white tunic red, the earth burning with rising temperatures, the risk of almost 30% of species facing extinction, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I wanna see this world / I wanna see it boil / It's only four degrees , she sings, and later asks herself, in Hopelessness , how did I become a virus? This time yellow, like a terminally ill patient.
Between the songs, with subtle arrangements by The Johnsons, as subtle as the balance of the species, the scientists' testimonies were played, interludes of a larger narrative that traveled from I'm a Bird Now (2005), from which we heard the sisterhood of You Are My Sister , to the most recent album My back was a bridge for you to cross (2023). Almost twenty years stitched together as if this moment was already being written before Anohni and Anthony, the same body, existed.
In between, an African-American spiritual song born from the orphanhood of slavery. Performing Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child , Anonhi embodied Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and all the strange fruits that continue to hang on trees full of blood. And if the taste of iron has not yet reached our mouths, it is because our taste buds are blind.
At the end of the concert, amidst tears and emotional people, intertwined in a genetic code of love and empathy, there was talk of hope. There was talk of transforming pain and grief into energy, a driving force to inspire others, as we heard from one of the witnesses. “Grief is an act of love and care.” Or, as the poet and essayist Ocean Vuong would say, “grief is probably the last translation of love.”
We all need another world. We will miss this one, we hear in Another World, in the last whistles of the concert. We will certainly miss Anohni when this spring is over. Will we not be wearing dresses down to our feet, so beautiful, so white, the next time we see each other?
If Anohni was a choir, Fontaines DC was a melon, with frontman Grian Chatten spending much of the concert clutching the Palestinian flag as if it were the flag of his homeland of Ireland. When you look at it closely, the colours are not very different and when it comes to oppression and occupation, colours and struggles become one. On the side screens, just like at Primavera Sound Barcelona, the words Free Palestine and Israel is committing genocide. Use your voice were displayed , while I Love You played.
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