👜✨The Nexialist #0148

record-breaking renewables | deactivated power plant | portuguese time capsule: lena d’agua | saudade de você | oral

Nov 23, 2023

welcome to another list of curated brainsparks, the nexialist

hello, world! i hope this message reaches your inbox and your eyes. i mean, this will be a lighter nexialist, as the days have been hectic: lisbon/web summit, a food poisoning (maybe with some infoxication) and dutch course finals. meanwhile, it seems the stars are unaligned all over the world… cease-fire is still not happening, the record heatwave in rio, the win of far-right candidate milei for argentina’s presidency, and the dutch elections also pointing in that direction. take this nexialist as a breath in the middle of the chaos. this week you’ll see some new discoveries from lisbon, from the past, present and future, and other musical happenings. enjoy 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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💨record-breaking renewables

after being for a week in lisbon, i got these great news: portugal just ran on entirely renewable energy for a record-breaking 6 consecutive days. i didn’t think something like this was already possible, so it did take me by surprise. some news to celebrate:

The new record was set between 4 am local time on October 31 and 9 am on November 6 – 149 consecutive hours, breaking 2019’s record of 131 hours – during which 1,102 Gigawatt hours (GWh) of renewable energy were produced. This ended up being more than the country needed, with both industrial and household consumption only reaching 840 GWh.
Although this record doesn’t mean that fossil fuel plants weren’t operating at all during this time, another national record set during this time demonstrated that may well be possible in the near future. Beating a previous high of 56 consecutive hours, Portugal also managed to go natural gas-free for 131 hours in a row, and for 95 of those hours, produced enough clean energy that some could be exported to neighboring Spain.

💡deactivated power plant

i got the chance to go to the maat (museum of art, architecture and technology) in lisbon. by coincidence, it is located in a deactivated power plant, where you can walk ~~time-travel~~ through the huge old machinery, and learn more about the past, present and future of energy.

the art exhibitions were also beautiful in this space, their garden and their more modern gallery building. there were magical gigantic immersive installations by joana vasconcelos, and “the surrealist castle of mario cesariny” who i was not familiar with, but it is the most famous portuguese artist involved in the surrealist movement. he was gay (there are beautiful references to that in his work) and persecuted for that during the dictatorship. it’s worth the visit if you’re in lisbon.

📺portuguese time capsule: lena d’agua

while in a store with a friend, a kind of synth-pop was playing on the radio, in portuguese. we shazamed it immediately, which i have to say it’s still one of my favorite ways of discovering new music, it feels like a coincidence untouched by algorithms —unironically i imagine it takes some algorithms to find the song that’s playing.

i had never heard of lena d’agua, a portuguese singer who is actually a pretty big deal in portugal. well, it turns out her songs became the soundtrack to this trip. i’m obsessed with her 1981 album, perto de ti, and i’m loving the lyrics, which could have been written today. in the first song she refuses nuclear energy, asking for more renewables, she also sings about nature, colonization, politics and other social themes.

Wanting to haunt / Com vontade de assombrar
Those who live on this land / Os que vivem nesta terra
With the nuclear nightmare / Com o pesadelo nuclear
In the eyes of a child / No olhar de uma criança
You can see the light of the world / Pode ver-se a luz do mundo
We will not leave you as an inheritance / Não lhe vamos deixar como herança
A dying planet / Um planeta moribundo

brainsparks: rip rita lee (tn#120), the earthquake that changed history (tn#81)

👜saudade de você

duda beat released a new song/video this week and i’m living for it. it’s chic, it’s horny, it’s classy, it brings 90s funk carioca references and it brings the untranslatable portuguese word to the title. that’s how you say you miss someone in brazil: saudade de você. learn it for your next brazilian crush.

⚔️oral

i just had to add this here, because well, it’s björk and rosalia. it is so nice to see unexpected ft. that work well. and for a good cause, it couldn’t go wrong.

Björk and Rosalía are donating all their rights to income generated by this song to the AEGIS non-profit organisation to combat open pen fish farming in Iceland. Their record companies have agreed to do the same. All funds raised will support legal fees for protesters, taking action to stop the development of intensive farms that harm wildlife, deform fish, and pose risks to salmon's DNA and survival. Immediate action is crucial. donate directly at: https://www.bjork.com/aegis

see you next week, brainsparks 🫀✨

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