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It’s not a church anymore.

Read all about it.

Let’s just start with what didn’t happen.

Or maybe a little before that.

Two Lisbon-based musicians, along with many of their fellow musician friends, where suddenly left without a place where they had worked for many years, and where they had enjoyed a greater freedom than in on other more conventional studios: 15-A, founded by visual artist and musician João Paulo Feliciano, home of Pataca Discos, an independent label.

The place shut down — a result of the changes that are overcoming the city and that made a part of Lisboa that used to be peripheral juicy for real-estate developers — and with it, all the possibilities within. The end of an era.

That studio’s history seemed to justify the leap of faith it meant for the two musicians to try and turn into entrepreneurs and so, in one fell swoop, to restore and honour multiple layers of the history the music recorded in Portugal and to allow for new music to be played and recorded in a place with an undeniably rich history.

Fellow musician friends were called, their level of excitement was measured and confirmed, partnerships were started.

History, with present and future so perfectly aligned that the project, as ambitious as it was, looked almost fated to succeed.

But the deal didn’t go through.

The two musicians thought: ‘if it didn’t work out here, maybe it’s not meant to be. But then they thought some more.

While it was true that the history-present-future symmetry of that space was impossible to reply somewhere else, it was also true that the synergy that the two musicians had created with their fellow musician friends.

What to do with so much energy and the dream of creating a place, now that it has seemed reachable.

Well, the trick was to keep looking. And, shortly after that, the right space appeared.
Not a studio with decades of history, for sure.

A baptist church built on the basement of an apartment building inaugurated in 1974, near the Lisbon Zoo.

It was spacious, with no walls. Up the stairs there was an office and a backyard nestled between the backs of the other buildings all around. The history started there, and it’s going to be good.

We call it louva-a-deus, a new space for communing with music in the heart of Lisbon.