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Two hours from Portugal, five hours from New York, the Azores lie in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The clouds here are so low you feel you have to duck to avoid them.

Small fishing boats hug the harbour wall while larger commercial vessels bob about in the perennial shadow of a cruise liner. Cargo ships dot the horizon and the occasional sight of a clipper evokes imaginings of the age of exploration.

Fitting, then, that this place between the New World and the Old World is home to a festival that links the history of music and culture with its future, and strives to make that future brighter.

António Pedro Lopes co-founded Tremor in 2013.

“The idea was to bring life back to the city centre, to the city centre of Ponta Delgada, which is the main city of the island of São Miguel, and also the biggest one in the Azores,” Lopes tells Euronews Culture, “which at the time was really set in a crisis… economical, social crisis. I mean, this was happening at the European level, and of course it was having consequences here, which means that the commerce was falling apart, lots of buildings empty, deserted, and even the city centre became a bit like a ghost town. So our goal with Tremor was this idea of bringing back life to these places by using those places that resisted the crisis, that could use a little push.”

More of a town than a city, Ponta Delgada is by turns quaint, warm, slippery and home to a handful of good bars and restaurants. This month it celebrates its 479th anniversary.

Tremor is celebrating only its 12th birthday this year, but it’s not just the capital that needed the push.

Netflix, drugs and poverty

The Azores is statistically the poorest area in Portugal and one of the poorest in the whole European Union with over 30% of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion. It is also the youngest area of Portugal with an average age of around 42.

Festival organisers began with a 24 hour showcase in 2013 but over time developed a much broader platform that has changed lives in areas outside Ponta Delgada. And one of these areas will be familiar to some Netflix viewers.

The quiet fishing village of Rabo de Peixe has found fame as the location for a successful TV series of the same name (‘Turn of the Tide’ in English) due to an incident over 20 years ago. In 2001, a colossal amount of cocaine worth more than 150 million euros was recovered from a boat that sank off the coast.

Tremor has worked with the young people of this village for over a decade.

“We have a long relationship right now,” says Lopes. “It’s probably around 10 years. It’s called Rabo de Peixe. It’s a fishing village, and it’s a place that is highly stigmatised, socially, but also in the media space. It’s a place that has been getting a lot of attention, because it’s called many times, it’s one of Europe’s poorest villages, because of high dependencies on public subsidies, drug trafficking, prostitution .There’s that, and it’s definitely not only specific to that place, but there’s also a lot of cultural richness.”

The Som Sim Zero project, which developed out of the relationship between the ondamarela music collective and the Deaf Association of São Miguel, were the entertainment in Rabo de Peixe but they’ve played on bigger stages such as the Lisbon edition of Rock in Rio.

Dino Oliveira has been involved with the project since its inception and knows how much Tremor has done for the area.

“Basically, it changed everything,” he says. “Basically, these kids that never did anything or anything different, some of them, we went to Rock in Rio, with this project. Especially this project, a community project. So, now everyone wants to get involved.”

“It totally changed,’ Oliveira goes on. “The first time they went into a plane, these people that would never probably in their lifetime go even near the airport.”

Secret concerts inspired coach trips to far flung parts of the Island where the natural world was the stage, but Ponta Delgada itself has an abundance of excellent venues such as the Teatro Micaelense, the Coliseu, and the Auditório Luis de Camões. 60 acts from 17 countries entertained a devoted festival audience of 1500 visitors. And the highlights included the quirky Joseph Keckler. Dressed so neutrally that he could have been on stage in any of the previous six decades, but his content is squarely in the 2020s.

Keckler reminds us that you should just do whatever you like to express yourself, and that following a framework is probably a drab idea. His operatic range is impressive although a different amplification setup might be useful as a closely mic’d up opera voice can be hard to listen to. His multimedia elements were nicely executed and who doesn’t like a tune centred around sexual liaisons with the supernatural?

Space in-vader?

Speaking of the supernatural, hailing from Argentina, the autotune punk circus that is Blanco Teta kicked off the festival with unrestrained brio, lead vocalist Josefina Barriex controlling the vocal pitch shifts on a contraption that resembles an 80s speak and spell machine. Barreix stalks the stage like a Star Wars hybrid of Darth Vader and Princess Lea while mad cellist Violeta García turns lab coat to lingerie.

I’m tempted to talk about performance art over music but let’s remember the Sex Pistols. Attitude was king then, too. On stage left, Bassist Carlos Quebrada grimaces and prowls like an Argentine centre back while drummer Carola Zelaschi gets her Animal on. Part Rage Against the Machine, part White Stripes and a sprinkling of Tracy Bonham, it is altogether a very good noise.

Thrash Jazz?

Another discovery came in the shape of Azorean-born Eugenia Contente. Playing a set that traversed jazz, funk and blues, Contente was the epitome of the happy performer, and I have never seen a Strat so viciously spanked on a clean setting. Part Stevie Salas, part Aristocrats, she blasts into Cuban jazz before peppering her blues jazz with scalic licks, all supported admirably by her band.

While some of the acts fell victim to their own profundity, decreasing their impact through self-indulgence, Contente is completely free of pretension and effortlessly bonds with the audience through the shared joy.

A green festival for a green island?

Keckler flew in from New York and most of the audience flew in from somewhere or other. And yet the festival has extremely sound eco-credentials.

In 2023, Tremor received the ‘A Greener Festival (AGF) Certification‘ which is setting the standard for sustainability in live events.

Lopes thinks any argument pinned on the carbon footprint is a misunderstanding of what sustainability really is.

“We’ve had conversations with sustainability experts in Central Europe to say like, oh, this festival is like one of those boutique festivals in the middle of nowhere, people have to fly there, but it’s not sustainable. A lie!” he insists. “Sustainability applies to context, and context is most of all infrastructure, the one that allows one thing to be sustainable or not. But more important than this technical dimension, I think where we champion sustainability is really on the social and on the human dimension.”

The festival takes in hiking trails, lakes, thermal baths, mountains and forests. You see a lot of green. And with that comes a responsibility, a ‘politics of care’ to use Lopes’ words, which takes the form of a ‘leave no trace’ ethos.

It’s certainly more of an avant-garde festival than any other I’ve attended, and, much like a fine dining tasting menu, the ‘pairing’ of acts with landscapes cannot help but thrill. I’m not convinced that the swarthy fishermen of San Miguel island are into the avant-garde, but I think they quietly enjoy an initiative that only wants to make a positive impact for islanders. And any trajectory that begins in hardship and ends up performing in Rock in Rio has to be a barometer for success.