DJ Spielberg: Evolution
The co-founder of Lisbon’s No She Doesn’t label was in the eye of 2020’s storm, and he doesn’t predict it will calm anytime soon.
It’s Sunday afternoon and January’s last outing of 2021. Lisbon is concealed within a remarkably white dome of overcast skies as a faint drizzle persists. I’m standing in the doorway of Hugo Barão’s renovated semi-detached house amongst an estate of unkept, 1950s-built dwellings. Hugo smokes a cigarette on the pathway between the side door and his small but healthy assortment of fruit trees. Oranges, lemons, and passion fruit are all hanging low from their branches.
“Try this.” Hugo hands me a fruit I don’t recognise. I eat it out of politeness, if nothing else.
“It’s a physalis,” he informs me as I tear open its leafy shell like a Ferrero Rocher rapper. Inspecting to see which ones are ready for consumption, he hands me another. And another. And another. And another. The tangy citric taste bounces around my mouth. Perhaps my Vitamin C deficiency is visible, in turn activating Hugo’s caring nature.
Although he is DJ Spielberg and co-founder of Lisbon’s No She Doesn’t label to some, Hugo is a tirelessly working doctor to others, specialising in family medicine. The past year, however, has seen the 32-year-old move into a respiratory ward caring for patients with Covid-19.
“It’s getting worse and worse,” Hugo tells me of Portugal’s January spike in Covid cases. “The situation is not good because the hospitals are full - and it's not only due to Covid. People are dying from other diseases because they can't be treated.”
“Were you thrust into the respiratory ward straight away? Like as soon as the first wave hit?” I ask.
“Yeah. I was there. I was there, fighting,” Hugo says. “But the situation now is much worse than last year in March. March was the first peak in Portugal but it's nothing compared to the situation now. The situation now is almost catastrophic.”
Hugo flicks his cigarette away and moves over to a kitchen chair placed in the middle of a minimally furnished sitting room. He crosses his legs and sits in a meditative posture as the surrounding bare, white walls help to further a thoughtless state. I plant myself on the couch next to the sliding patio doors.
“So what can we expect from the next year?” I ask.
“I think we're going to have to deal with this disease a little bit longer,” Hugo says. “I don't think that with the vaccinations being rolled out in the new year everything is going to be solved and everything is going to go back to normal. So yeah, it's going to take a little bit longer. I actually don't think that we're going to have gigs in 2021.”
“Fucking hell,” I say. “I guess people have to get past the false notion of ‘Bye 2020, here's 2021!’”
“Yeah, that's not how it works.”
“But surely, like me, you saw people in certain circles be like, 'Ok, clubs are finally going to open!' and then you, as the doctor, had to be like, 'No, this isn't going to happen!’"
“I think most people had the notion that it wasn't going to work that way,” says Hugo.
I hadn’t been under the same impression when hanging around my peer group. “Ok, maybe the people I hang out with are stupid,” I say with an expression of discomforting realisation, triggering a healthy cackle of laughter from Hugo.
Dressed head-to-toe in black, with black mid-length hair and beard to match, Hugo plays host by asking if I’ve eaten lunch yet. It’s around 4pm and I haven’t, which Hugo goes about fixing as if it’s somehow his fault. He heads to the kitchen lit by the range hood lights to cook up a Portuguese specialty: codfish. There are literally a thousand ways to cook codfish, Hugo tells me, but he’s opted for açorda de bacalhau (codfish bread soup). My role as guest and my culinary incompetence allows me to just sit at the small table-for-two by the wall and stay out of the way.
“Working in the hospital is what I do to sustain the thing I like most, which is produce music,” Hugo says, chopping some garlic. “But I'm happy with my choice. I'm happy with what I do.”
“So if it came to it, would you like music to be your sole source of income? For music to be your entire life?”
“That's so difficult. I think that's difficult for a living. I don't think I would even produce more if I only made music so I'm happy with my current work-life balance. I think it's actually good if you're not only doing music because sometimes you get frustrated because things are not going as planned. Or you're not producing the quality that you are trying to achieve. With this kind of work where I'm not thinking about music and then I come home and produce, it's like making wine. You do the wine and then you leave it to age and then check again. Similarly when I make music, I make some tracks, then I go to work, and then I come home and see the tracks and see what I can do differently with them.”
After being fully immersed in his perspective and predictions regarding the Covid-19 pandemic, I’m glad that Hugo has reminded me of his music projects. “So, No She Doesn't started in 20-”
“2017,” Hugo confirms as he sees me stalling on the exact year. “With this lo-fi movement.”
“Oh, so is that where the name DJ Spielberg came from?” I ask. The lo-fi house fad, of course, had propped up several gimmicky names such as DJ Seinfeld and Ross From Friends - each providing melancholic chords and a yearning fuzz for a love that once was. No She Doesn’t continued this trend with a collective consisting of DJ Spielberg, DJ Legwarmer, and DJ Baywatch.
“Yeah, we were making fun of the names,” Hugo says. “Lo-fi is easy. You just grab that sample that you like, put percussion from Roland 909 or 808 on it, filter, it's done. It was fun in that year and it got a lot of hype as you know, but now it doesn't make much sense to just continue doing it forever.”
Hugo’s upcoming Carregada/Calibrada [NSD005] release on No She Doesn’t certainly does step away from his humble lo-fi beginnings as he ventures into darker electro and junglist-bass territory. “We'll evolve and keep doing new stuff and try to surprise,” Hugo remarks.
Originally from Loulé, a countryside town in the south of Portugal, Hugo now sees Lisbon as the ideal base for him. It is the allure of the culturally rich institutions stacked within this city of staggered Jenga blocks, each building looking more precariously and nonsensically placed than the last along near ninety-degree slopes.
“For now, I just think that this is the only spot where I can have that equilibrium,” Hugo says. “I have access to more cultural stuff that I don't have in my hometown. So for me, it doesn't make sense to move there now. You don't have access to other cultural movements like festivals and shows and gigs and, so, for me, it doesn't make sense to move from here.”
The mass influx of young digital nomads on foreign wages, which dwarf the average salary here in Lisbon, means that locals are being viciously priced out. The irony is, so too will the creatives themselves. It’s the cyclical nature of the migrating bohemian. Simultaneously the cause and effect of gentrification.
“It's starting to get a bit more hostile and local people that lived there are going away because developers want to build hotels,” Hugo tells me as he serves up our food.
“So you may well settle back down in the countryside. Possibly with a partner and kids,” I suggest.
“I had a big relationship. I had a girlfriend for nine years, but yeah, we're now separated,” Hugo says.
There’s an ever-so-brief moment of silence, which I break.
“Ok, yeah - - - so there's a lo-fi album on the way?”
Hugo laughs and is unfazed. But as I dig into this açorda de bacalhau, I’m aware that I’ll probably have to try the 999 other codfish dishes elsewhere.