Ilo Varga

I make records slowly and play them loudly. Most of them start with a place: a boat, a greenhouse, a salt pan, a flat with a broken fan. I go there for weeks with a recorder and a notebook and wait for the songs.

I was born in Budapest in 1994 and grew up in Faro, where my mother taught piano and my father fixed boat engines. Both of those are still in everything I do. I moved to Lisbon in 2016 to study sound engineering, dropped out in the second year, and spent the next three working the late shift at a rehearsal studio in Marvila, recording anyone who would let me.

My first album, Small Hours, came out on cassette in 2019. Tide Clock followed in 2023 on Tidewater Records, after a year of writing one song a month along the river. The tour that came after it ended at B.Leza in June 2024, and the recording of that night is still the thing people ask me about most.

On stage it is usually five of us: Marta on bass, Ricardo on drums, Joana on guitar, Duarte on saxophone when we can afford the extra hotel room, and me on synthesisers and voice. On my own I play long DJ sets, mostly at Lux Frágil, where I run a monthly night called Late Shift.

Salt Season, my third album, was written in Setúbal in the summer of 2025 and recorded live in nine days. It comes out on 30 October 2026, and we take it on the road the week after.