Mucho Flow 2025 through five key performances

Delivering on its promise to spotlight cutting-edge avant-garde sounds, Mucho Flow’s artfully curated 12th edition honed in on left-field pop, atmospheric shoegaze and experimental noise.

With its gothic medieval architecture and surrounding verdant mountains, there are few places that feel more fitting to spend Halloween and All Saints Day than the historic city of Guimarães. Situated 30 miles inland from Porto, the birthplace of Portugal is dotted with 12th-century churches, historical shrines and gothic structures. Walking through its medieval streets feels like stepping into a fairytale or a gothic novel, especially with rainfall so torrential that a yellow weather warning is issued. All this formed the backdrop for this year’s edition of Mucho Flow, one of Europe’s best-kept secrets when it comes to boundary-pushing electronic, avant-garde and experimental music.

While the city of Guimarães is steeped in history, the festival’s meticulously curated line-up is wildly futuristic, spanning ethereal, left-field pop, abrasive, industrial-tinged dance-rock and blistering, digitally enhanced noise. It took place across three days in a smattering of eclectic venues all walking distance from each other, including the pristine Centro Cultural Vila Flor and renovated 1930s cinema, Teatro Jordão. The programme contained no clashes, so festival goers shuffled between venues en masse, as though being led on a special quest, or a particularly progressive school trip. Alongside live music, the festival offered a series of talks on subjects such as the end of the internet and future creative archeologies. There were also club nights featuring local and international DJs like Simo Cell b2b Verraco, Minna-no-kimochi and DJ Lynce. 

Mucho Flow’s programming is uncompromisingly avant-garde, committed to “bending the norm” and “making every stage a space for disruption.” While the phrase “avant-garde” gets bandied around a lot, the artists on this line-up felt genuinely eclectic and subversive. The forward-looking originality of groups like Los Thuthanaka and YHWH Nailgun, alongside the experimental, collaged soundscapes of artists such as Lauren Duffus and TRACEY, felt all the more urgent against the backdrop of the growth of AI-generated music, which can only ever imitate what already exists. Even when it feels discordant or slightly unfinished, there’s a bold triumph in trying to break out into new territory. 

From frenetic New York noise-rock to indigenous Andean rhythms, here are five performances we’re still thinking about. 

Lauren Duffus

During her Friday evening set, rising Londoner Lauren Duffus layered disparate sounds to create a composite collage that journeyed through 00s-inspired R&B, dancehall, trap and grime. Enriched with electronic beats and finished with eerie synths and samples of church bells and choirs, Duffus’ voice echoed back and forth as though she was in endless conversation with herself. Her breathy, angelic vocals floated above discordant keys as the bass ricocheted through the dark, industrial basement of Teatro Jordão. Fractured beats overlapped, intertwined, hovered, clashed and meshed, pulling us into her lush, layered sound world. On stage, her silhouette was obscured by smoke and pulsing lights, evoking foggy London nights spent waiting for the bus back from the afters.

TRACEY

While there was little consensus on this year’s song of the summer, TRACEY’s breakout, dub-step indebted hit, Sex Life, was a strong contender, tearing up dancefloors across the festival season. The London duo’s extended live version at Mucho Flow was a high point of their set, transforming the basement of Teatro Jordão into a sweaty, exhilarating club night. But before reaching this intoxicating crescendo, they opened with softer, more downbeat tracks like Take Care and When I choose to be here with you. Songs were interspersed with samples from film and TV shows about characters called Tracy, such as Emmerdale’s Tracy Shankley or Hairspray’s Tracy Turnblad. This playful, tongue-in-cheek tone was carried through in the bratty, unreleased tracks that followed on from the mid-set rendition of Sex Life. Their performance was a chaotic collage of influences and inspirations, creating a sense that the duo are figuring it out as they go, but that only makes watching them all the more compelling. 

Los Thuthanaka

Bolivian-American sibling duo Los Thuthanaka paired mind-melting visuals with ear-splitting sound, traversing traditional genres of Andean dance rhythms by way of blown-out experimental production and heavy electric guitar. Donning fringe jackets and cowboy hats, they galloped through their set with raw power and an uncompromising attitude. Armed with an electric guitar and a dual-keytar, they blended sounds old and new, from traditional huayño dance music to blistering ambient noise. They were backlit by cartoonish psychedelic visuals depicting a running alarm clock and an insect on fire. The set reached its apex with an unrelenting bombardment of sound accompanied by these hallucinogenic visuals as if the whole building was about to collapse in on itself. Indeed, the performance felt like a kind of purification. Their fiercely anti-colonialist sound is intentionally confounding at times, but it truly comes alive during their confronting live performance.

YHWH Nailgun

When YHWH Nailgun frontman Zack Borzone took a pause from his frenetic, convulsive dancing to stare into the crowd, you felt as though he was staring directly into your soul. This intensity was carried through their set with relentless energy. The New York four-piece’s brand of experimental noise-rock blends discordant synths and ritualistic drumbeats with distorted, throaty vocals released like animalistic roars. Borzone hopped and writhed and jerked, throwing himself around the stage with rapturous abandon. It felt instinctive and imperative, creating a sense of abrasive chaos and moments of unease, but for all the harshness, there was a spellbinding quality at the show’s core that felt profoundly alive.

Maria Somerville

Emerging from a blue fog, Maria Somerville’s hazy, dreamlike vocals were cushioned in reverb. Following from YHWH Nailgun’s set, it was an abrupt tempo change. Rather than affronting, her music could lull you into a dream, but it was no less mesmerising. It felt otherworldly. There was a quiet magic to her shimmering, soft-focused dream pop. The set was briefly interrupted by technical difficulties on-stage, but once sorted, the Irish singer-songwriter continued to float through her shimmering blend of shoegaze, post-punk and ambient electronics with a sublime calm.