Semibreve celebrated fifteen years of experimental sound in Braga

For 2025, Braga’s long-running experimental music festival deepened its conceptual focus on listening as a communal creative act.

Having established a reputation for showcasing acts at the very cutting edge of experimental electro-accoustic music, this year’s edition of Semibreve Festival was no different. At once maintaining a focus on platforming local talent, the programme cherry-picked from a pool of both lesser-known and more established acts from across the globe in special commissions and world premieres.

Whilst keeping its promise of intimate, high-impact shows, beady-eyed attendees could notice the subtle particularities of this year’s edition. More so than before, a conceptual focus on listening practice informed both the music and cultural programme, which included a lecture on the ontology of sound and a workshop on communal listening. 

The heritage of Braga – a mountainous city in Portugal’s northernmost province and Semibreve’s home since its inception in 2011 – is a large part of the festival’s identity. Its nickname ‘Rome of Portugal’ nods to the city’s foundations as a Roman-era religious centre, as well as its over-thirty church buildings, three of which play host to this year’s performances. Braga’s coveted music schools and its identity as a UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts for contributions to digital art manifest in Semibreve’s focus on multimedia shows and sound installation.

The opening act neatly embodies the duality of Braga’s old and new. Thursday evening sees the worshippers of the eighteenth-century church, Basílica dos Congregados, replaced by a congregation of Semibreve attendees whose rustling raincoats and muted whispers form a prelude to the performance by synthesist Heinali and vocalist Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko. The Ukrainian collaborators’ tribute to visionary 12th-century Benedictine nun Hildegard von Bingen makes full use of the building’s remarkable acoustics; the melodramatic swells of Heinali’s drone the numinous grandeur of Saienko’s voice, matching up to their Baroque surroundings.

Friday’s music programme begins in the equally-opulent auditorium of Braga’s Theatro Circo. Legendary Portuguese guitarist and composer Rafael Toral performs Traveling Light, a project released that same day, which slows down ubiquitous jazz standards like My Funny Valentine, abstracting them according to Toral’s own artistry. In one of three live performances played alongside a saxophonist, flautist, clarinet and flügelhorn player, Toral is seated amongst a sea of effect pedals which he deploys in turn until his gentle throngs are barely recognisable to the instrument sounding them.

The nighttime programme continues at gnration: a well-kept multi-story cultural centre which hosts a year-round programme of free-access art exhibitions, talks and workshops subsidised by European Union funding bodies – enough to make a post-Brexit Brit grimace. A delicious juxtaposition to the saudade tenderness of Toral’s show, Philadelphia percussionist NAH’s performance revels in maximalism and excess. Positioned in the centre of the Black Box space, his frenetic beats draw from both the sonics and sensibilities of free jazz, footwork and noise. His is the most mobile crowd we see all week with punters taking lead from his own hyperactive stage presence. He passes the baton to the equally galvanising aya, who performs her most recent Hyperdub album hexed!. It’s brilliant, and British crowd members can find another level of amusement in her distinctly dry, hyper-local quips that largely get lost amongst a largely EU audience. It’s clear that, for her, it doesn’t matter whether the jokes she makes between tracks land; she’s making them for her own entertainment.

After aya jokingly referred to her set as an ‘emptyset tribute act’, the following evening, it’s the Bristol duo’s turn to take to the Theatro Circo stage in a performance of their new project Dissever. Marcel Weber (a.k.a. MFO)’s lighting design contributes to a full-frontal sensual assault. Those who boarded the emptyset train in the early 2010s will have been thrilled by the remarkable likeness between their early works and their most recent project, on which – as aya also wryly remarked – the kick drum is retired in favour of slower-burning, more brooding electronics. Ever-lasting crescendos tantalise the listener’s craving for a drop, enveloping them in the music’s own temporal world. It’s a standout show – as the first whoops from the Theatro Circo audience confirms, as if the excitement they’d stored up while confined to their seats is finding a momentary escape.

At gnration, those hanging in the balance can release the pressure valve via a B2B set from Braga’s own drum ’n’ bass stalwart Mix’Elle and Lisbon selector Violet, who treated us to an all-killer selection of 160 and half-timers. It transfers seamlessly to a nostalgic live set from Planet Mu boss µ-Ziq, whose glitchy breakbeats are visualised by ID:MORA’s retrofuturist, cyberdelic visuals, which take from an aesthetic palette akin to that of vapourwave. Nonetheless, these raucous sets highlight a certain mutedness in a crowd whose energy doesn’t quite match up, perhaps pointing to the sterilising effect of a purpose-built club space. Those moments draw a line between the name ‘Black Box’ and the term ‘white cube’ – a term used to criticise minimalist art galleries which enforce distance between the art and its viewer and thereby preserve a sense of sacredness.

Sunday inaugurates a new venue: the University of Minho’s medieval rectory hall, where Lebanese multi-instrumentalist, videomaker and puppeteer Yara Asmar takes to a stage positioned between two sections of the audience. Having, by this point, heard our fair share of synthesised drone over the course of the festival, her accordion offers an analogue alternative. Punctuated by the reverberant strikes of a metallophone, its sound passes gracefully through effect pedals to form an enchanted atmosphere which tickles the hall’s every crevice. When we catch up later that day, she explains that the accordion is a family relic.

“Finding that accordion in my grandmother’s attic was one of the most beautiful moments of my life,” she says. “On occasions, I’ve been tempted to replace it with a new one, as the limitations increase as it gets older. But with time, I realised that, as it deteriorates, it offers me something slightly different. For example, it’s now really easy to bend notes, and the metal flap, which has come loose, creates a really nice buzz when I hit certain frequencies. I discovered the beauty in working with the limitations of your instrument, as well as the acoustics of your surroundings. Of course, it can be frustrating, but it’s also full of wonderful surprises.”  

Our conversation casts a reflection of her performance through an even more tender lens, as if the accordion’s bellows release generations-old wisdom, and the whimsical sound of the metallophone recalls fairytales from her childhood. 

We return to the Theatro Circo auditorium for the closing acts: the first a hotly-awaited collaborative performance between two seminal artists, Suzanne Ciani and Actress – both of whom have made significant contributions to their respective corners of electronic music. Concrète Waves was programmed as part of The Independent Movement For Electronic Scenes (TIMES), which commissions collaborations between artists from around the world to showcase at EU festivals (cue another post-Brexit wince). As could be deduced from the project’s name and conception from two artists whose reputations precede them, its basis is formed by snippets of found sound, offering glimpses of familiar worlds which are later swept up in strangeness. A cacophony of car horns, Errorsmith-esque vocal chops and heavily-processed wave sounds give way to one of Ciani’s delicate Buchla-made arpeggios or Actress’ muffled kick drum. It’s haunting, sinister and refuses to humour us with a resolution. 

Albeit slightly more earnest in concept, the next act does little more to satisfy that craving. Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and synthesist Aimée Portioli – better known as Grand River – performs her latest project, Tuning the Wind, her electronic synthesis of natural world sounds ending in an uneasy climax as if serving as a cautionary tale. It’s a well-produced, high-concept show to draw an end to a week full of them.

There is significant merit in Semibreve’s conscious effort to maintain a high level of intimacy and continuity. When I speak to the festival’s co-founder Rafael Machado and co-programmer Pedro Santos, they explain their refusal to grow the festival in size. Instead, they measure its development in terms of its evolving form and expanding network amongst a global community of artists and other festivals. The experiences of programmed artists is at the forefront of their mind, a sentiment reflected in Yara Asmar’s acknowledgement of Semibreve’s unique approach in booking fewer artists to reserve capacity for meticulous sound checks and a high level of hospitality for each act. “It was the least anxious I’ve ever been when performing at a festival,” she tells me, referencing the unique level of care and cooperation from the team. Of course, that translates directly to the quality of the audience’s experience of the acts; a tenet that all too often goes remiss in music festivals.