emmy Curl grew up in the mountains of Trás-os-Montes, in Portugal’s far north-east, a long way from Lisbon and from fado, the music Portugal treats as its national culture. Up in the north people speak differently, with their own pronunciation and accent, and on the plateau around Miranda do Douro they have a language of their own, Mirandese. For a long time that way of speaking carried a stigma. “We had a lot of prejudice over the years about talking like that, because that’s how we talk.” She was born Catarina Miranda in Vila Real, into a family of amateur musicians. Her father had a home studio, and that is where she learned to produce, recording her own songs from a very young age and posting them on YouTube. She was playing live at 15 and released her first EP, Ether, at 17. “I was living in the mountains, not in Lisbon, not in Porto. Without the internet, I wouldn’t be here.”
Her early songs moved between two worlds. She sang in English, and she also played cancioneiro, traditional Portuguese song with more of the Celtic north in it than fado, though she had yet to research where it came from. That came later, abroad. “I was in Denmark when I really decided to go deeper into this subject.” From a distance, her country looked different. Portuguese people grow up being told their music and culture are small next to those of the big European nations, but from Denmark she could see how much Portugal had, above all in the north.
That realisation became Pastoral, a project that now spans two albums. The first, Pastoral, released on Cuca Monga in 2024, arranged traditional songs from the north and the wider interior for synths and electronic beats. It also kept an old promise to a friend she once lived with, the Trás-os-Montes multi-instrumentalist Hugo Correia of Fadomorse, who co-produced it. “I told him, one day I’m going to make a traditional album, and I’m going to invite you.” The record won the 2025 Prémio José Afonso, Portugal’s award for albums rooted in the country’s music and culture, by a unanimous jury, and took her on a tour of more than 70 concerts. The second, Pastoral 2.0, released this year on Exemplar Discos, the label she set up with her co-producer Andreas Sidenius, goes back to the accent she grew up hearing. She sings the way her family speaks and, on a shepherds’ ballad called “Romance da Lhoba”, for the first time in Mirandese. “With this album I thought, you know what, fuck it. I’m going to sing the way I heard my grandparents. And it feels so good.”
A few weeks ago she was one of the artists selected to showcase at WOMEX, the world music expo, held this year in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and it was her first time there. For her showcase on the evening of 23 October she had prepared a 45-minute condensed session from both albums, with her video clips and artwork shown alongside the music. We met that afternoon, a few hours before her soundcheck, under a hot sun that felt more like summer than late October, and talked about what an expo like WOMEX means to an artist, the ‘solarpunk’ ideas behind her songs, the northern culture the Pastoral albums set out to bring into view, and the generation of Portuguese musicians now digging into their own roots.
A trade fair like WOMEX sits awkwardly with how she thinks about her work. “As a musician, it’s a bit overwhelming to see people here judging music as a product, when what we’re creating is art. But we live in a world where it has to be that way if the music is going to be heard anywhere beyond our own room.” The people she has met have made it easier. “They’re very transparent about it. We all know this is a business, and that transparency makes me feel people are more personal in the end. Sometimes it’s a shit show, but it’s how we can promote our work and get our message to more people.” Whatever the business around her, her own aim stays the same. “I’m here to deliver the message from my source, from our source, and let it be. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, that’s okay. The experience itself is already worth it.”
The message she brought to Las Palmas was built for the eyes as much as the ears. “As a visual artist, it’s difficult for me to separate them.” That evening she would be singing in Portuguese to delegates from around the world. “I try to make the narrative as clear as possible for the audience, even though today it’s in Portuguese and many people won’t understand.” The images had a job to do. “I hope the visuals at least communicate the feeling. They’re a good opportunity to talk to the eyes, since the music can be hard to understand.” At the centre of those visuals is a character from the first Pastoral, a fairy, “the one who brings hope that good things will happen, a good vision of the future, the one who represents the magic that was dying, hoping people will believe.” That character needs room on stage. “It could be challenging in a little club, because I need space for my wings too.” Performing, for her, means stepping back. “Before I go on stage, I feel I’m just passing on a message. I’m just a channel, a vehicle for this information. It goes beyond me. It makes me lose my own ego.”
What she wanted to bring to that stage was an idea as much as a sound. “Some of the songs are like manifestos for a future where technology and nature come together in a sustainable way.” The idea now has a name. “People call it solarpunk. I’d been working on this theme for many years, but only about two years ago a friend told me, ‘You’re very solarpunk.’ I started discovering the genre and realised it’s what I’ve been doing since I was about 20.” She sees it as the opposite of cyberpunk, a future “where we all become cyborgs controlled by capitalism and the elites, which is more or less what’s happening.” She expects both futures to exist side by side. “There will always be two worlds. One where this system is pushed to the extreme, and others where people use the system’s own tools to create and bring other perspectives.” That is why she finds the label useful. “Maybe it’s good for people to have a box where they can go, search and think for themselves. I think it’s a good proposal for the future.”
To build that future, she first had to dig into a past she feels Portugal has overlooked: the Celtic roots of its north. “The Celtic roots were all over Europe. Northern Europe was full of Celtic tribes, and so was the north of Portugal.” The national story she grew up with left that out. “In the north we always felt that something was missing, that we had another culture nobody saw.” She believes that past has something to offer now. “Mainstream music today is all so similar. I think we can offer something new when we look back at our roots.” The Pastoral albums were made to give that culture a place. “I had a narrative for both albums: to create a reference for my country, to help Portugal look at something different from what we’d been told our culture was.” Across the border in Galicia, musicians have already gone further down the same road. “In Galicia I’ve seen them take this much further.”
Bringing that music back meant changing what sits underneath it. “Traditional music was very modal, always built on very specific pillars, with people singing on top of the same bass.” She saw room to move. “It’s interesting to see how, over the same tune, we can change the chords and the harmonies and create new feelings.” Her example is “Senhora do Almortão”, a traditional song from Beira Baixa on the first Pastoral. “It’s a very modal song, staying on the same chord and the same bass, but we changed the structure of the harmonies behind it.” Her own training let her fill a gap she had noticed in other artists’ versions of traditional songs. “There wasn’t much jazz or classical music in the mix. I’d learned all of that over the years, and I couldn’t leave that knowledge behind.” That kind of experiment is easy to misread. “When we experiment, it’s sometimes very misunderstood, and it’s hard to put in a box. But it’s a deconstruction, so we can see all the parts and everything that can be combined.”
Her taste for the club comes in too. On “Romance da Lhoba”, from Pastoral 2.0, built around a sample from the percussion group Retimbrar, she pushes the rhythm towards the dancefloor. “I like to rave, I like techno, I like jazz, many different styles. With northern music, especially the Celtic side, the strong beats remind me of techno.” The ballad itself is far older than any dancefloor. It belongs to the Iberian romancero, the narrative songs passed down orally across Spain and Portugal, and is one of its oldest. The scholar Ramón Menéndez Pidal dated it to before the 16th century, shepherds sang it above all on Christmas Eve, and folklorists have collected more than 200 versions in Castilian, Galician and Portuguese. Hers is the Mirandese one. “It’s the story of a shepherd who goes into the mountains with his sheep, and suddenly a wolf comes and steals one of them.” The shepherd sets his seven dogs on her, and once they run her down, the she-wolf pleads for her life. “She says, please, I beg you, for God and for your soul, call off these seven dogs.” In the traditional text she also promises that if he lets her go back to the mountains, she will tell everyone there that not even the King of Spain has dogs like his. That final turn is what won her over. “It’s one of my favourites, also because in the end the wolf talks.”
She reads the song as “a kind of fable”, and it reaches back to something she grew up with. “We grew up thinking a wolf would come for us at night. Being afraid of the dark was very common. This song is about that, about the mysticism people live through these stories. On one side you have people praying the rosary, on the other you have people who find a stone on the ground and start telling legends about it. There’s a light side and a dark side.” When the album came out, she wrote about what the song had done to her. “It made me cry so spontaneously and so many times, and now I’m fulfilling my duty to take this magical story, in Mirandese, to stages in Portugal and across Europe.”
Singing that repertoire in her own accent changed her as a singer. “Art is also about self-discovery. You find the ancestral singing you had forgotten, you get shivers on your skin, and you discover something new inside yourself.” Her own voice was part of that discovery. “When I started doing it, I discovered a new voice inside me.” The prejudice against that accent, she believes, goes back to Portugal’s decades of dictatorship, which ended with the Carnation Revolution in 1974. “It’s still in our blood, this fear of taking risks.”
That fear is loosening. A whole generation of Portuguese musicians has turned to traditional repertoire in recent years, and she has a theory about why. “When COVID hit, people went for what they knew, what was safe, what they could see. There was a general feeling of going back to the roots, to our parents’ houses, to our countries, because that’s where we felt safe.” She also points to decades of American cultural dominance, though she bears no resentment about it. “Empires come and go, and that’s okay. I’ve learned so many things. But as artists we got fed up. We’d reached a point where almost everything sounded the same.” Among the artists she names are Retimbrar, whose research she admires, Galandum Galundaina, who still sing in Mirandese, Gaiteiros de Lisboa and Ana Lua Caiano. “There are so many. Suddenly there was a boom of artists trying to express these roots again.” Musicians from that scene gather at Bons Sons, the festival in the village of Cem Soldos, now held every two years, “an amazing festival that brings Portuguese musicians together all at once.” She wants more places like it, and has started one herself. “I’m one of the managers of Escola Normal, a cultural laboratory with houses in Funchal and Porto. We host artistic residencies and events, and the idea of the events is to gather musicians around a table again to eat together, ten through open calls and ten invited.” She sees those gatherings as a response to a wider problem. “We all want to know each other, but we don’t have the places. Especially in Portugal, a lot of cultural venues are closing.”
For her, though, the question of risk is also personal. “Mirandum”, the original song that opens the first Pastoral, comes from her own life, and she describes it as a song about “the fear that gets stuck in us and stops us from trying, from making mistakes, from moving forward.” “Bento Airoso”, a traditional song from Trás-os-Montes on Pastoral 2.0, turns from that fear to the folk beliefs of the north. “It’s a song about mysticism, which has always fascinated me. It could be another thread alongside nature and technology. I think mysticism is what glues it all together.”
Nature and technology have been her main thread since she first started playing live at 15, recording songs in her father’s home studio. “I’m fascinated by what one is and what the other is, where the balance lies, and where we’re heading. That’s been my guiding line forever.” There is plenty more to come, including a book she is writing. “I’m hyperactive creatively. I can’t stop, I can’t spend a day without making art.” One plan is already fixed. “I’m definitely going to make an album dedicated to Mirandês. There’s still so much to do with that beautiful language.”
Explaining all of this to strangers is the hardest part. The day before her showcase, someone asked what kind of music she plays. Her answer, “traditional with fusion jazz and techno”, left him none the wiser. She has a better one. “I’m a scientist of art. I like to experiment. I like to risk. I like to go beyond borders.” Whatever the reaction, she wants one. “I like to show something that makes you question, or makes you think. Maybe you don’t like it, maybe you love it, but at least it’s questioning you.”
emmy Curl's Pastoral 2.0, released in September, is available on the main streaming platforms and on her Bandcamp page along with Pastoral and the rest of her catalogue