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 Stroom offered to reissue The Piri Piri Samplers in 2024, augmented with a collage of recordings made by the duo as part of Serra's Les Ateliers Claus residency in Brussels (“O Terço dos Homens”), the label kindly suggested that if the duo were to make another record, they would be interested in releasing that as well. The problem was that the pair still lived a thousand miles away from each other (Leonard in London; Serra in southern Catalonia), and had not played together for half a decade. Initial attempts to record remotely were, in short, a disaster. After a few months of failing to pull together more than a disorganised Dropbox folder of unfocused phone recordings, Serra frankly texted Leonard to say that the album obviously wasn't going to happen, and so they should just sack it off and forget it. This was the breaking point the project needed. Within a month Leonard had flown to Catalonia to begin tracking; a week after that, the first half of the record was done; a month after that, Serra had moved down the road from Leonard in Lewisham, South London, and the duo were meeting every week to develop new material.
The first Or Sobre Blau album was edited down from three half-hour improvisations, each recorded with little preparation on consecutive afternoons in Portuguese high summer heat. “Making Friends”, in
contrast, was worked on over six months. The fragments of cadences and melodies that flit across “Piri Piri”'s rapid-fire jump-cuts are now fleshed-out songs in their own right, a lattice of nylon and steel strings, pianos, drums, handbells, samplers, and a dozen other instruments. For the first time, the two sing together (retaining the dichotomy of their original recordings, the duo stick to their native Catalan and English respectively, sometimes delivering translations of each other's lyrics at the same time).
Harmonically, the duo's debt to Slint's ambivalent dissonances and the misshapen free blues of Loren Connors and Bill Orcutt remains evident, as is a longstanding love for Enablers, whose poet-frontman Pete Simonelli makes a formidable appearance on “Top of Duboce / Tyne Bridge Crossing”, one of the record's two eight-minute centrepieces. Added to this, the more expansive sound on “Making Friends” draws from wells as varied as Title Fight's scrappy emo, Yellow Swans' ultra-thick blasted-out fuzz, and Maher Shalal Hash Baz's cracked arborescent chamber music.
“Making Friends” is a record about its own making: a reflection 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".
