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Aidan Belo is a nostalgic person. Not so much in the sense of thinking everything was better in some way-back-when, but in the sense of carrying a deep curiosity toward the past, and an acute tuning to the strange, unfathomable mystery that is time passing. There’s a Portuguese word that helps to explain this: saudade. “That’s what the wives of sailors would use to describe this feeling while their husbands were gone at sea,” explains Belo. “There’s no direct English translation but it’s like longing, melancholy, nostalgia, all those things bundled up. I want to evoke those kinds of emotions.”
So when he started his alternative and experimental folk project His His in the fall of 2020, it was natural that the past (and all its constituent parts) was a character, an aesthetic, and a guiding principle of the project. Belo constructed a makeshift studio in an old barn located on his family’s farm in Schomberg, Ontario, a tiny farming community an hour north of Toronto where Belo’s father landed after immigrating from Portugal. Belo began recording there using a Tascam Portastudio 4-track cassette recorder, and over the next year, he released a string of singles and a debut EP, 2021’s appropriately named Garden Songs.
The works introduced His His to the world, and announced Belo as a unique, moving artist: The music he creates has roots in folk, indie, lo-fi, and bedroom music communities, and yet it’s Belo’s approach to the orchestration, recording, and mixing of these parts that makes the sound of His His so special. The compositions are at once intimate and foggy, lived-in but distant, like cherished cornerstone memories that get blurrier with each year. When you hear warbles and smears, audible artifacts of the interaction of analog materials, they are not digital reproductions of a feeling—they are the genuine item.
Belo continued releasing music through 2022 and 2023, selling out his hometown debut show at Toronto’s Monarch Tavern and touring the U.S. and Canada with coveted appearances at POP Montreal and SXSW. With more than 1 million streams across streaming services and features on Spotify Editorial playlists like Fresh Finds Folk, plus regular rotation on SiriusXM and CBC Radio, Belo released his second EP, Good Gold Cassette, on Victory Pool Records.
Good Gold Cassette is a profound deepening of His His’ vision, and an immediately lovable, lush, and exploratory record. Inspired by his father’s life and community—as well as the Supertramp Breakfast in America tape that played on repeat in his dad’s pickup truck—the collection opens with a collage of found sound and strumming, a scene-setting that unfolds into “Get-Go”, a warm summer morning of a song that’s gone as soon as it’s arrived. “My Friend Wants to be a Freemason” and “Good Gold” wheel forward on beautifully saturated drum grooves, instant lo-fi indie classics, and swaying closer “Outside” introduces omnichord to the palette. The layered richness of “Cabra” is a particular point of pride for Belo. Belo recorded the vocals and guitars to his Tascam before bouncing the files to his computer, where he built them out. “It’s very simple and minimalist,” he explains. “I used to play in a shoegaze band, so that was the opposite approach: the more layers, the better. A lot of the time, the song can get obscured by that.” At the end of the digital process, Belo sends the tracks again through another reel-to-reel cassette deck for a mix before mastering, completed by his friend and mastering engineer Gavin Gardiner.
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