Rejoicing in the Hands

This Is the Way

“João Alegria is an essential figure in the Portuguese underground music scene. With a prolific career spanning over a decade, the guitarist – as he prefers to be called – embodies artistic commitment, resilience, and a deep devotion to crafting dark, experimental soundscapes. The numerous albums the Lisbon-based musician has released testify to a sonic vision akin to its object of study: unhurried and unperturbable, yet continuous and tempestuous."

— João Morado (Beats for Peeps, Cosmofonia, Jazz.pt)

“You paint for fame & status, I paint for freedom & awareness”, reads one of the vertical graffiti that Mr.Paradox Paradise painted on some Berlin building. Likewise, there is nothing in João Alegria’s art that is done with the intention of fame or likes. He spent more than a decade editing with recognition limited to the “community” of sound nomads. “I’ve been doing this for some time and I don’t have a very wide audience”, he admits. However, who knows, knows. And who knows, like it. João Alegria’s music is for connoisseurs. Perhaps that will always be the case.
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However, the unique contours of his art, combined with a stubborn aesthetic consistency and prolificacy, are the characteristics that simultaneously nest and vitalize it. The unconditional and obstinate way in which this “guitarist” – as he likes to be called – has created his work is a rare case of perseverance. His motivation? It’s not entirely explicit, but somewhere between the love of music and the physiological need to create lives the truth of João Alegria. If he lives because he breathes, he seems to make music because he has to live. One senses in his speech an inevitability of cathartic genesis that surreptitiously emerges between the lines like a figure wandering through the night.
João Alegria can also move through the shadows, but his music definitely points to the heavens, full of verticality” 

– João Morado (Beats for Peeps, Cosmofonia, Jazz.pt)

This Is the Way

Devendra Banhart