Terrakota

From TerraKota flourishes a natural music deep rooted in the Black continent, inspired by the Saharan, Caribbean, Hindu and the Western sounds that rise under the Jamaican sun. In most cases, African music is simply the expression of life through sounds in which the musician beyond imitating the sounds of nature, using natural musical instruments, also reverses this process using the sounds of nature in its music.

This is TerraKota's motive; they use African traditional and popular harmonies and rhythms, playing various instruments from all over the world, further to the usual Western instruments such as bass, guitar and drums. They perform a careful fusion in which every new sound has its space in the web under which the themes develop. In a time in which the majority of the western modern music variants seems to head to a dead end, many Western musicians are turning to new features from all over the world. They aim to create fresh sounds and give to their music the soul it lacks to find in the Western world in which a single human brain in front of a mega computer produces almost everything. It is as if just like planet Earth, in an advanced stage of degradation, the western music also needed a catharsis, a return to the natural state to be able to breathe again. In 1999,three elements of the band, after a few years of a serious study of Mandinga percussion, went on a trip of around 3 months to Western Africa(Senegal,Mali,Burkina, Faso and Marble Coast),where they met with a variety of new harmonies and rhythms with an outstanding purity and simplicity. The band began right there and starts experimenting in African ground, learning from breed musicians as well as from the simple citizens. Before their return, they acquired a series of traditional instruments (built with natural raw materials) and learned the basics on how to play and build them. Back to Lisbon, they carried on with the work they had started in Africa and following its growth the admission of 3 more elements from diverse musical backgrounds in a first stage and in the next year the last of the present 7 elements. On the course of these 2 years the band has worked effectively to create its own warm and exotic sound with contagious performances in which the public joins a trans-African trip ending up with a big party. Nowadays, TerraKota's music can be described as an effervescent fusion of African sounds from the continent-mother to all the destinations of the African people all over the world, being all the influences catalysed in a reaction of vibrant and explosive energies. The band also shares with the African peoples a strong bond with reggae that in general has in Africa the same dimension that pop rock achieves in the West, enhancing its importance in the development of their work.