{"product_id":"or-sobre-blau-making-friends-lp","title":"Or Sobre Blau - Making Friends (LP)","description":"\u003cp\u003eAndreu G. Serra and Kiran Leonard first met in Lisbon nine years ago, arriving in the city within weeks of each other by chance. Living together in a crumbling warehouse in Alto São João, they recorded a series of improvisations that became The Piri Piri Samplers (Memorials of Distinction, 2019): Serra’s abrasive, tape-warped guitar lines colliding with Leonard’s stark, pedal-free counterpoint. They played a single gallery show, left Lisbon that summer, and then spent almost a decade living in different countries.\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eWhen Stroom reissued The Piri Piri Samplers in 2024, the label suggested the duo make a new record. At first, it seemed impossible: Leonard was in London, Ubaldo in southern Catalonia, and their attempts at long-distance recording quickly collapsed into nothing. But the near-failure sparked something. Leonard travelled to Catalonia to restart the process in person; soon after, Serra moved to South London, and the pair began meeting every week.\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eThe result is Making Friends: a richer, more expansive album built over six months. Where The Piri Piri Samplers was assembled from raw improvisations, Making Friends transforms fragments into fully realised songs, weaving together nylon and steel-string guitars, piano, drums, bells, samplers and more. For the first time, Serra and Leonard sing together, each in his own language - Catalan and English - sometimes translating one another in real time.\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eMusically, Making Friends still carries the jagged dissonance and free-blues spirit of the duo’s earlier work, while opening outward toward everything from emo and blown-out noise to fractured chamber pop. There are only three guests on the album, and they are worth mentioning: Rachel Leonard and Antonia Serra (the musicians' mothers) on the seventh tune, and the American poet Pete Simonelli (of Enablers) appears on Top of Duboce \/ Tyne Bridge Crossing, one of the album’s two sprawling centerpieces.\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eAt its heart, Making Friends is an album about friendship: about distance, reunion, family, and the stubborn need to make music together. It begins with uncertainty and disconnection, but ends somewhere stronger - with, as put on the closing track, “molta il.lusió per lo que pugue vindre” or “much excitement for what may come.”\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"STROOM","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57467922678104,"sku":null,"price":28.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0259\/9403\/5259\/files\/a149789672516.jpg?v=1780833874","url":"https:\/\/3345.nl\/nl\/products\/or-sobre-blau-making-friends-lp","provider":"3345 Record Store The Hague","version":"1.0","type":"link"}