OR SOBRE BLAU is the duo of Andreu G. Serra [ Ubaldo ] and Kiran Leonard. The project originated in 2017 when the pair lived together in Penha de França, Lisbon, after having moved to Portugal at the same time by chance. Originally from southern Catalonia and north-west England respectively, the two – still today – tend to communicate in a poor garble of Spanish, English, Portuguese and Catalan, which gives rise to misunderstanding, disputes and comedy. The work of the duo is firmly rooted in a constant geographical and linguistic dislocation, as reflected in the project’s name, a literal translation into Catalan of the Portuguese idiom ‘ouro sobre azul’ (blue over gold), roughly equivalent to the English phrase ‘the cherry on top’.

True to the project’s form, the pair have rarely lived together in the same place; only at the very beginning, in Lisbon, where their debut cassette the Piri Piri Samplers was recorded. First released by Memorials of Distinction in 2019, the cassette is an attempt to map the members’ distinct and complementary approaches to the guitar: Serra’s use of pedals and tapes to create thick, winding soundscapes, drones occasionally punctured by splenetic stabs and flourishes; Leonard’s more traditional, direct-line technique, often acting as harmonic foil. Since then, the project has intermittently resurfaced when the pair find themselves in the same space again: most notably for a stretch of dates in Belgium and the Netherlands in 2019, built around Serra’s residency at Brussels’ Les Ateliers Claus and the duo’s appearance at Meakusma Festival. A selection of recordings from the 2019 residency has been compiled into a new piece, “O Terço dos Homens”, which will appear on Stroom’s reissue of the Piri Piri Samplers due for release in late 2024.

In a sense, the work of Or Sobre Blau is typical of the duo format, whereby the sum is greater than its constituent parts; where each party only understands two-thirds of what is going on, and the unknown and wrongly interpreted triumphs over composition and reason. As to the question of what the ‘sum’ comes to, the answer is endearing and a little malformed, like a bad translation. It ends up looking like a vase broken into pieces.