STREET MUSIC PROJECT

CAMACHOFONES BAND

By the year 2013, I and some of my friends from my hometown started a project of street music. Madeira Island, our home, is a very famous and touristic destination and our idea was the creation of a project to go to the streets of Funchal, the capital of Madeira, play for the locals and tourists and get some money. Initially, the idea was strongly connected with the reality of unemployment, a big problem for young people in a small island like Madeira with a lack of market opportunities.

For that project, the creation of a unique instrument called Tubofone was essential. The Tubofone can be seen in the image below.

TUBOFONE, MUCH BETTER THAN A FERRARI

In the beginning, it was not easy to perform in the streets, in a city where these kinds of projects were not common. Even our families were sceptical about the idea. Playing in the streets is connected with homeless, misery and other depreciative ideas. Nevertheless, we knew that what we were doing was something unique for the place. Jazz, Afrobeat, Valsa, and other styles were among our list of cover songs and original. The Tubofone with a pentatonic scale was mainly doing the bass. Saxophones, trumpets, Tuba, Trombone, percussions and vocals, altogether turned in a unique music project that started to have feedback from locals and visitors from every corner in the world.

CAMACHOFONES PLAYING, A PAINTING OF A TOURIST AND FAN

After the first years, the project started to have really good feedback from the public. It was a bureaucratic battle against the local authorities to find a legal solution to play in the streets. There was an absence of a Cultural Policy for projects like CAMACHOFONES. After some meetings and discussions with local politicians and authorities, we had, in a regime of exception, a license to play in the streets. The project was a stimulating force to start a debate about street art in Madeira and the possible Cultural Policy related.

The project went so well that we travelled to Lisbon and Porto, the two most important cities in the mainland of Portugal. In Lisbon the struggle against the authorities and the local governments was surreal. It is incredibly confusing the cultural policy in the Portuguese Capital. We were constantly stopped by the police and the public were protesting against them. We had so many people watching us play that we took the risk and we kept performing, always trying to escape police and authorities with the feeling of doing some crime when we were just playing music with a big audience all the time. We were arrested and we had to pay a fine once.

Above, the argument's moment with the authorities.




In Porto, the cultural mentality seems to be different and we were very welcome there with no problems in having the license to play. It was amazing. We were two times in Lisbon and one time in Porto. We had a chance to go to Barcelona, but Catalunya has also a very complex Cultural Policy and we cancelled the journey. All of our journey outside of Madeira was sponsored only with our work and our own money that we earned in the street performances and with the sellings of our first album, released in 2016. 

CAMACHOFONES IN LISBON, 2015

                                                               CAMACHOFONES IN PORTO, 2016

Internationalization and Pseudo-internationalization

After some years of work and after our project started to have an impact locally and overseas, we started to notice something that we call "Internationalization without moving". Of course, we are talking about the phenomenon of moving in real life, travelling, playing in a different destination. With the Touristic reality in the Island, where people from different places and cultures use to be present during the year, and after selling a considerable number of CDs, we realized that our work was starting to have feedback from several different places in the world. Messages from different countries were coming to us in our email and our Facebook page. Having in mind ideas and concepts of digitalization, Globalization, cultural content dissemination, we can ask if are we in a context of real internationalization of our work or not? There are two sides to this question. First, our digital content, videos, photos, etc are among the new dynamics of Global dissemination, the McLuhan's concept of "Global Village". Here we are talking about something different compared to what we realized secondly. The feedback in an International level was mostly related to the CDs we use to sell to the visitors on the Island. This is something different because there is an element of real contact, of real life in the argument. To have feedback about our original songs and our Cd, it needs to exist real contact because our Cd is not Online or uploaded in some musical platform on the Internet. We realized that our work was having an International level without moving (from the side of the content, from the side of our part) because our public, most of the times, is from different countries, different cultures. Indeed, they are the side of the relationship that needs to move. But what we reflected was "Internationalization without moving" from the cultural product. Another important fact that was important for us in the development of this reflection was the existence of musical projects in the Island and in the country that are normally said to be International projects because they have been travelling around the world. The problem is, in our reflection, that those projects are travelling all the time to play for the diaspora, the Portuguese people living around the world. Our question is strongly related with the public, and those projects, even travelling outside of Portugal, they are not changing the public, they are not having feedback from different cultures and people from different countries. The public is always the "same". Can we talk about Internationalization and Pseudo-Internationalization from the public point of view? We believe it is a good reflection to do having concepts of globalization, culture, dissemination, art and so on in mind.

Today the project is still going on. CAMACHOFONES are a project with several gigs in agenda and with the idea to release the second album of original songs. Something that began with a big struggle against the conventions and mentalities is now a reference of originality and, of course, music. My presence in the band has been intermittent in reason of my studies, my literature and writer life, professional life and my other band. Nevertheless, it is a project that I am proud to belong and the future is here for us.

It is easy to find our work on Youtube, just clicking the name CAMACHOFONES

We also have a Facebook page www.facebook.com/camachofones

João Paulo Nóbrega Freitas

Cardiff, 16th March 2020