Or Sobre Blau (Andreu G. Serra & Kiran Leonard) / dbh

Grey Lantern presents

Or Sobre Blau (Andreu G. Serra & Kiran Leonard)

+ support from dbh

𝑰𝒎𝒑𝒊𝒆𝒕𝒚 𝑯𝒐𝒖𝒓 {fka 𝐏𝟑 𝑨𝒏𝒏𝒊𝒉𝒊𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝑬𝒗𝒆}

Andreu G. Serra and Kiran Leonard are guitarists and good friends. They met nine years ago, having moved to Lisbon within a couple of weeks of each other by pure chance. While living together in a large, horrible warehouse in Alto São João, they recorded a set of improvisations later released as “The Piri Piri Samplers” (Memorials of Distinction, 2019), which captured the duo's distinct yet complementary approaches to their instrument: Serra's rasping, wildly idiosyncratic lead lines spilling over looping beds of tape manipulation and ebow, and Leonard's contrastingly traditional, no-pedals counterpoint. They played one show at an art gallery, both left Lisbon before the end of the summer, and did not live in the same country again for almost a decade.

When the label Stroom reached out to reissue The Piri Piri Samplers and offered to release any new material the duo might have, the pair rekindled their creative partnership to create Making Friends, a record that reflects on a decade of friendship, on the importance of friend and family bonds (the song “Rachel & Antonia” is named for, and excerpts phone conversations with, both members' mothers), and the duo's shared, irrepressible, inexplicable need to play and record music with others. The duo begins the record distant and confused -- the first track “Campanilleros” records their agonising attempts to remember how to play music and communicate together (Leonard realises he has more or less forgotten how to speak Spanish) -- and they end closer and stronger both as friends and collaborators; sharing, as Serra remarks on the final track “La invitació de l'anguila” (the Eel's Invitation), "molta il.lusió per lo que pugue vindre" or "a lot of excitement for what may come".