Filipa Santos is a Portuguese, Porto-based alto sax player, flutist, bagpipes player, vocalist, and electronics player, whose work weaves elements of jazz, Portuguese folk music, and experimental electronic music. Fellow Portuguese jazz guitarist Miguel Moreira, who is also based in Porto, is known for his creative timbral approach. Like Santos, he was a member of the local traditional folk band Mandrágora.

Santos and Moreira have been working together as a duo since 2013, and Now Swim is already their third duo album. The nine electroacoustic soundscapes suggest how they have developed an almost telepathic, multilayered performative complicity, enriched by Santos’ caressing vocals, various effects, synths, and vintage electronics.

Fellow Portuguese composer Vitor Rua calls this duo «Two bodies, one common vibratory field». He observed in his liner notes that the album’s title condenses its philosophical dimension, and implies accepting instability, trusting an environment that sustains without offering fixed ground, and recognizing that transformation as a continuous, endless process.

The like-minded sonic swimmers Santos and Moriera seek a peaceful, organic, and genre-defying complementary coherence, without unnecessary dramas. Now Swim suggests a series of loose but sensual, lush, and lyrical atmospheric pieces, which are, according to Rua, ontological morphologies comprised of accumulations and transformations of spectral densities.

Eyal Hareuveni

Filipa Santos (alto saxophone, flute, vocals, electronics), Miguel Moreira (electric guitar, nylon string guitar,  synthesizer, sampling, percussion programming)