On music, memory, discipline, insularity, collaboration, and the courage to imagine an Azorean artistic life without borders

An island teaches two apparently contradictory lessons. It teaches belonging—the intimate knowledge of place, the almost physical certainty of origin, the familiarity of voices, streets, gestures, weather, and memory. But it also teaches horizon. To live surrounded by ocean is to be continually reminded that another shore exists beyond the visible one. Perhaps this is why the most compelling island artists are rarely those who simply reproduce the place from which they come. They are those who transform insularity into a form of imaginative departure, carrying the island with them while refusing to allow it to become a boundary.

Something of this tension inhabits the story of Rafael Pereira, known artistically as Rafa, an Azorean musician and songwriter whose emerging career is as interesting for the questions it raises as for the music it is producing. His is not merely a narrative of a young performer attempting to build an audience. It is also a meditation—sometimes tender, sometimes impatient, occasionally severe—on what it means to become an artist in the Azores in the twenty-first century: to inherit the advantages of intimacy while confronting the limitations of scale; to love one’s place without romanticizing it; to understand talent not as divine visitation but as discipline; and to recognize that artistic identity is less something discovered once and for all than something continuously constructed.

The image with which Rafa’s story might best begin is not a stage at all. It is a room.

For years, that room was his refuge, laboratory, rehearsal space, and private geography. He began studying drums at six, first with Lázaro Raposo and later Dino Oliveira, eventually moving toward self-directed study and absorbing influences such as drummer Cobus Potgieter. University temporarily distanced him from music, but during the pandemic he felt the need for an instrument capable of harmony and tonal expression and turned toward the guitar. In 2020, a recording of himself performing “Tennessee Whiskey” unexpectedly attracted attention. A microphone followed. More recordings followed. Radio followed. Eventually, the private act began becoming public.

Yet Rafa has never entirely left that first room. He calls it his “temple.” Even now, after becoming a working musician who performs extensively, he remains attached to that private space where music exists before applause, before the market, before promotion—perhaps even before ambition. There is something revealing in the metaphor. The room is not simply where he practices; it represents the interior life from which the public artist must repeatedly emerge. The stage requires visibility. Art requires solitude. Rafa seems to understand that a musician needs both.

His evolution has also been strikingly plural. Drums gave way to guitar without disappearing entirely; guitar opened another harmonic world; voice became something to be studied seriously; and piano has now entered his musical education. He has taken guitar lessons with Tiago Franco and later Pedro Guimarães, studied voice online with Sara Megre and Brazilian singer Ju Feliciano, participated in workshops and online courses, and pursued studies in Music Production and Technologies at the conservatory with Emanuel Cabral. He speaks repeatedly about mentors and about the acceleration of knowledge that occurs when one allows oneself to be taught.

This is important because it undermines one of the most persistent myths surrounding artistic creation: the mythology of the natural gift. Rafa is deeply suspicious of the idea that musicians simply are. In his view, musicians become. Talent may provide disposition, intuition, sensitivity, even an initial vocabulary, but artistry is constructed through repetition, correction, failure, listening, humility, and time. His interview returns again and again to study—not as an academic ornament surrounding creativity but as one of its foundations.

There is something almost Socratic in one of his observations: the more he studies, the more he realizes how little he knows. For Rafa, technical knowledge constitutes one of the few relatively objective dimensions of music; taste remains subjective, but musicianship requires vocabulary, resistance, theoretical understanding, technique, and the ability to comprehend increasingly complex musical languages. His references range from Dream Theater to jazz, from metal to MPB, from soul and pop to electronic music. His conclusion is wonderfully contemporary: musical purity has become largely illusory. “Nothing is pure anymore,” he suggests; music now exists through crossings, borrowings, encounters, and recombinations.

That may be one of the most illuminating ways to understand Rafa himself. He resists the box.

He can speak enthusiastically of Mike Portnoy and Dream Theater while acknowledging that his listening has moved increasingly toward MPB, soul, pop, rock, and selected electronic forms. His tastes have changed because he has changed. Music, in this sense, becomes biographical: what we hear differently at thirty from what we heard at sixteen reveals not necessarily the transformation of the music, but the transformation of the listener. He remembers once disliking Brazilian music and now speaks admiringly of Djavan and Tim Maia. He increasingly listens to jazz standards he could not appreciate when younger.

The same principle governs his songwriting. Rafa does not appear particularly interested in creating a rigidly branded musical identity and then inhabiting it indefinitely. His music changes because his emotional life changes. This makes his development less predictable, but potentially more interesting.

And nowhere is that relationship between biography and creation clearer than in “Fantasmas.”

The death of his grandmother was not simply a personal loss. It became a rupture in the architecture of his life. At the time, Rafa had completed a degree in European Studies and International Politics, was pursuing a master’s degree in Business Management, and was interning at the Regional Fund for Science and Technology. His grandmother’s cancer diagnosis and death forced an existential reckoning. He abandoned that trajectory and chose music.

“Fantasmas” emerged from that territory of grief and memory. In the interview, Rafa recalls being the grandson who went to meet his grandmother at church every Sunday. The song preserves fragments of that remembered world—the church entrance, the sound announcing her nearness, the child awaiting the grandmother. He admits that performing it continues to affect him profoundly.

Here music performs one of its oldest functions: it becomes a vessel against disappearance.

The dead cannot be returned to us, but art rearranges absence. It gives memory rhythm, melody, duration. What is irretrievable in life becomes repeatable in song. Every performance of “Fantasmas” therefore contains a paradox: the grandmother is absent, yet the song continually summons the world in which she was present.

Rafa understands instinctively that autobiographical music possesses a particular force. He can write about experiences he has never lived, entering imaginatively into other lives, but he recognizes that something different happens when the singer is also the witness. The song then ceases to be merely performance. It becomes testimony.

Yet Rafa does not wish to remain artistically inside mourning. That is crucial.

His first songs belong, as he puts it, to “Rafa in mourning.” The music now taking shape belongs to another emotional season: a happier, romantic, sensuous, more rhythmically expansive Rafa. He describes his developing sound as increasingly pop and Afro-influenced, fresher and more summery. The proposed debut EP represents not simply another recording project but a deliberate movement away from sadness. He paused its development because he realized that frustration had begun determining the music. The earlier songs no longer represented the person he wished to present. He now imagines something more rhythmic and festival-oriented: “That energy is my home.”

There is considerable artistic intelligence in knowing when not to release something.

In an era obsessed with content, frequency, visibility, algorithms, and the perpetual production of the new, Rafa’s willingness to interrupt his own momentum suggests an understanding that artistic growth occasionally requires silence. A work may be competently written and still cease to represent its creator. The decision to wait can therefore become an act of authorship.

The emerging EP appears to move deliberately from elegy toward eros, from death toward desire, from retrospection toward immediacy. Rafa describes it as a story of youthful love—a relationship flowering in the enclosed intimacy of a car, where for two people, temporarily, the surrounding world disappears. “Vem,” the projected opening song, began while he was driving, when a phrase came unexpectedly to him. At the time of the interview, that song was complete while the remaining tracks existed only in fragments.

There is almost a symbolic symmetry here. The artist whose first originals emerged from the irreversible departure of someone he loved now turns toward the beginning of love itself. Grief looked backward. Desire looks forward.

But the artistic story cannot be separated from the geography in which it unfolds. And it is here that Rafa becomes particularly provocative.

He loves the Azores enough to be angry with them.

His criticism is severe and should be understood as his perspective rather than as an uncontested diagnosis of Azorean cultural life. He sees a musical environment weakened by limited investment, inadequate professional structures, insufficient audiences willing to pay for live performance, destructive underpricing by musicians themselves, excessive ego, rivalry, and an unwillingness to celebrate the advancement of others. He uses the brutal metaphor of crabs in a bucket: when one begins climbing, another pulls it down.

The metaphor may be uncomfortable, but beneath it lies a larger question familiar to small cultural communities everywhere: how does a peripheral artistic ecosystem become large enough psychologically to transcend its smallness geographically?

An island cannot increase its landmass by wishing. It can, however, enlarge its intellectual and artistic networks. It can collaborate. It can circulate knowledge. It can invite critique. It can reward experimentation. It can refuse the provincial temptation to treat another person’s achievement as a diminishment of one’s own.

This is perhaps the most significant dimension of Rafa’s argument. His answer to insularity is not simply departure. It is collaboration.

His experiences outside the islands appear to have strengthened this conviction. In creating his original music, he has worked with Pedro and Tiago Joaninho, associated with D.A.M.A., and with musician and writer Gonçalo Malafaya. He rejects the romantic notion that authenticity requires solitary composition; professional musicians, he observes, routinely write and create with others. Even “Vem,” which he wrote entirely himself partly to prove that he could, is something he expects to refine through further collaboration.

For him, collaboration is not the dilution of authorship. It is the expansion of possibility.

The same philosophy governs recording. Rafa made the costly decision to record, mix, and produce in Lisbon and to have the work mastered in the United States. He describes this as bittersweet because he would have preferred to achieve the desired production standard within the Azores. His music was ultimately mastered by Marcus Grimaldi, and Rafa speaks of the relationship that developed between them with evident pride. The entire process required a substantial personal investment, one he justifies with a sentence that renders spreadsheets almost irrelevant: “Music is the love of my life.”

This insistence on quality is central to his emerging identity. Rafa does not appear to want regional success on regional terms. He wants work created in the Azores—or originating with an Azorean artist—to withstand comparison beyond the Azores. That distinction matters. Regional culture becomes diminished when “regional” is quietly permitted to become a euphemism for lesser standards. Cultural specificity and professional excellence are not opposing principles.

Indeed, Rafa’s experience outside the archipelago seems to have made him acutely aware of the difference between local recognition and participation in a larger professional field. His statement that in Lisbon he is “nothing” initially sounds self-deprecating, but its deeper meaning is almost the opposite. He understands scale. He has encountered musicians of extraordinary ability and discovered a professional culture in which players move among projects, studio musicians and live musicians may serve different purposes, and collaboration does not necessarily threaten identity.

Humility, in this context, is not thinking poorly of oneself. It is knowing how large the world is.

And Rafa very clearly wants that world.

He is particularly troubled by hearing the fatalistic sentence: “You’re from the Azores; you won’t make it.” He believes regional and national artists are treated differently and notes, with some sadness, that his music receives more listening attention in mainland Portugal than in the Azores. Yet the empirical reality of his career complicates the pessimism: he performed 143 concerts in the previous year, working in solo, duo, trio, quartet, and now quintet configurations.

One hundred and forty-three performances are not a fantasy of professional life. They are professional life.

They also expose another dimension of artistic labor often invisible to audiences. The concert is merely the visible tip of a much larger structure: lessons, rehearsals, equipment, repertoire preparation, travel, correspondence, contracts, promotion, accounting, booking, technical arrangements, songwriting, recording, mixing, mastering, and continual study. Rafa speaks candidly about needing an agent precisely because the administrative machinery surrounding the music is beginning to consume time that should belong to composition and recording.

This is why his argument about payment deserves serious attention. For Rafa, the professionalization of music requires artists themselves to resist the devaluation of their labor. He is willing to perform without payment for charitable causes, but otherwise insists that artistic work must be remunerated. His position is less mercenary than ethical: if musicians continually accept fees that do not cover their expenses, they participate in constructing a market in which professional artistic life becomes economically impossible.

His own life makes that economics tangible. He earns his living primarily through performances of cover songs, while original music has thus far generated relatively few concerts. Recording “Vem” and completing the EP require travel to mainland Portugal and considerable expense; even mastering a single track represented a significant cost. Consequently, the original project develops at the speed that financial reality permits rather than at the speed artistic ambition would prefer.

This is the less glamorous truth of independent artistry. Songs may begin in inspiration, but records are also made from invoices.

Rafa is equally thoughtful about technology. His position on artificial intelligence avoids both technological utopianism and apocalyptic fear. He accepts AI as a potentially valuable tool for learning, refining ideas, and reducing certain technical burdens, while rejecting the proposition that automated generation can replace the originating artistic consciousness. For him, the idea must remain human. He uses the Moises application, for example, to separate audio tracks when learning songs, and sees no contradiction between technology and musicianship when the former remains a tool of the latter.

More interestingly, his defense of human musicianship rests upon imperfection. The slight delay, the pulse, the mistake, the microscopic irregularity—these are not necessarily defects. They are evidence of life. Rafa fears standardization more than technology itself because music becomes human partly through what cannot be perfectly replicated.

This idea connects beautifully with another of his convictions: the mistake belongs to music. He has little interest in becoming a human machine reproducing a recording without risk. Technique matters enormously to him, but technique should make freedom possible rather than eliminate humanity.

His biography outside music may help explain this combination of pragmatism and imagination. Rafa completed his degree in European Studies and International Politics after initially considering Psychology. He worked in several strikingly different environments: the Regional Fund for Science and Technology, Cresaçor, the Business Association for the Sustainability of the Azores, the Azores Tourism Observatory, retail, real estate, hospitality, marketing, and social media. He believes the university degree he no longer uses in the conventional sense nevertheless gave him essential skills in public speaking, presentation, communication, and professional self-possession.

Nothing, then, was entirely wasted.

This may be one of the quieter lessons of his story. Lives do not necessarily advance through clean sequences in which every previous chapter is discarded when the next begins. The political studies student remains somewhere inside the musician who understands institutions. The bartender remains inside the performer who reads a room. The marketing experience remains inside the independent artist trying to build an audience. The project manager remains inside the musician calculating recording costs and coordinating performances. We carry abandoned lives into the lives we eventually choose.

Choosing music has nevertheless required sacrifice. Rafa speaks without sentimentality about the financial uncertainty of full-time musicianship. He saves because no month guarantees the next; he reinvests a substantial portion of what he earns into music. His parents initially found it frightening that someone with a university degree would abandon the expected professional path. Yet he now earns a living through music and, perhaps more importantly, can say that his working life consists largely of things he loves doing.

That does not mean obsession is automatically virtuous. Rafa admits that his perfectionism once became unhealthy. Too many hours of practice deprived him of social life; eventually he had to learn that artistic discipline without human experience can impoverish the very imagination it is supposed to nourish. He now studies less but more intelligently. His conclusion is simple: “In balance lies the key.”

It is a revealing evolution because the artist who began by believing that more hours necessarily meant greater progress has discovered that life itself is part of artistic education. One cannot write endlessly about living while refusing to live.

And so we return to the question of luck.

The mythology of artistic success loves that word. Someone was discovered. Someone was lucky. Someone happened to be in the correct room when the correct person entered it. Rafa does not deny chance, but he radically redefines what “luck” has meant in his own life. His luck, he says, is spending part of his monthly income on lessons; staying home while others go out; missing Saturday dinners with his family; sleeping three, four, or five hours to complete what he has planned; continuing when others doubt him. His “luck” has another name: work, dedication, love, and sacrifice.

There is danger, of course, in turning sacrifice itself into a romantic ideal, and Rafa’s later recognition of the need for balance wisely complicates the narrative. But the essential principle remains powerful: consistency matters more than occasional intensity. Eight hours of practice followed by days of nothing accomplishes less than the disciplined continuity through which craft becomes almost bodily.

Perhaps that is why Rafa’s ambitions do not sound absurd even when they are large. He wants his music on Rádio Comercial or RFM. His singles are already receiving regular radio play, and he understands reaching major national stations as an important threshold. Beyond that lies an even larger dream: one day, he wants to perform at NOS Alive.

He does not know whether he will. That uncertainty is essential.

A dream whose fulfillment is guaranteed is not much of a dream. Rafa’s philosophy is instead to behave professionally before the world has fully conferred professional recognition, to imagine beyond the evidence presently available, and to understand failure not as humiliation but as proof that one attempted altitude.

His words at the end of the interview deserve to remain close to their original simplicity: “Risk, dream, fly high.” If one falls, he suggests, the fall at least proves that one had been flying. And perhaps this is where Rafa’s individual story becomes something larger than itself.

The most interesting question is not whether one young Azorean musician eventually performs at NOS Alive, reaches Portugal’s largest radio stations, secures a record contract, or completes the EP exactly as he presently imagines it. Those milestones matter enormously to the artist, naturally, but the cultural question extends beyond them. It concerns whether the Azores can increasingly become a place where artistic ambition is not treated as pretension; where collaboration is stronger than suspicion; where young musicians can think simultaneously of Ponta Delgada, Lisbon, London, New York, Rio de Janeiro, or any other cultural center without believing that embracing the world requires repudiating the island; where professional standards can be international while artistic memory remains intensely local.

Because the future of Azorean culture cannot depend solely upon preservation. A culture survives not only because it remembers what it was, but because each generation is permitted to imagine what it has never yet been.

Rafa belongs to that second movement. He is not abandoning the island by wanting something larger. In a profound sense, he is enlarging the imaginative territory of the island itself. His music may contain pop, soul, rock, MPB, country, Afro-inflected rhythms, electronic textures, memories of metal, and whatever other languages he has not yet encountered. That plurality need not make him less Azorean. It may make him representative of a particularly contemporary Azorean condition: rooted and restless, local and digitally global, shaped by inheritance yet impatient with inherited limitations.

And perhaps there is no contradiction between the boy in the room and the musician dreaming of the festival stage.

The room was never the opposite of the world. It was where the world began. Inside it, a child learned rhythm. A young man taught himself, listened, imitated, failed, tried again. Later came guitar, voice, piano, teachers, studios, musicians, Lisbon, American mastering, radio, 143 concerts, songs of mourning and songs waiting to become celebrations of love. The room became what all true places of apprenticeship eventually become: not a prison but a point of departure. Rafa still calls it his temple. Perhaps he is right. Because a temple is not where one hides from the world. It is where one prepares to enter it.

Based on a an interview in ComplxoN–a superb cultural project. The entire interview in Portuguese is availble of their Facebook Page.

https://www.facebook.com/complexon.instintocriativo