minta & the brook trout http://virb.com/minta minta & the brook trout has just been released! listen to "large amounts", the opening track and first single, "on lust", "i don't want to" (with walter benjamin) and "without it".

BUY THE NEW ALBUM at cdgo, louie louie or retrosaria (for about six euros). you can also download it at cdbaby for five bucks.

minta's debut ep, you, came out in late 2008. its 5 tracks are right here for you to listen to.
if you really like it, there are still some copies for you to buy online at retrosaria, cdgo or flur. joao maio pinto's artwork is certainly worth it. the ep can also be downloaded from places such as cdbaby.

photos by vera marmelo and goncalo franco. profile pic by eduardo vinhas.

more on minta: minta on myspace
info: minta[at]minta.me
booking: rita ascensão | ritamariajosefina@gmail.com | +351 932 854 073
minta & the brook trout at sonicbids
PRAISE FOR MINTA & THE BROOK TROUT (2009): — One of the best Portuguese albums of the year, 4/5, Lia Pereira, BLITZ — absolutely wonderful music made of luminous and sublime songs, António Pires, i — Minta & The Brook Trout's music is like that: curious, poetic, unexpected, enthralling, Nuno Catarino, Bodyspace.net — Elegantly melancholy songs (...) that pull you in, Mário Lopes, Público — Excellent, Henrique Amaro, Portugália, Antena 3 Radio]]> Virb 2.0 (@minta) en A Song To Celebrate Our Love — Music Video by Tiago Hespanha featuring a doll by Rosa Pomar http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/6867632 the super eight super video to Minta's A Song To Celebrate Our Love, by my friend Tiago Hespanha. It took some time, but it was worth it. It features one of Rosa Pomar's trademark cloth dolls, a monkey whose name is Anacleto. A Song To Celebrate Our Love is the first song out of You, Minta's debut EP which came out in late 2008. Enjoy! Francisca (Minta & The Brook Trout) MINTA: A Song To Celebrate Our Love Directed by Tiago Hespanha Kitchen puppeteers: Iuri Albarran & Tiago Lança Doll by Rosa Pomar Lisbon, 2009. ]]> Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:02:06 -0800 http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/6867632 celebrate3 http://virb.com/minta/photos/6867046

Still from A Song To Celebrate Our Love — Music Video by Tiago Hespanha featuring a doll by Rosa Pomar

]]> Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:28:08 -0800 http://virb.com/minta/photos/6867046 A Song To Celebrate Our Love http://virb.com/minta/videos/6827109 Minta: A Song To Celebrate Our Love — Music Video by Tiago Hespanha featuring a doll by Rosa Pomar

]]> Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:23:29 -0800 http://virb.com/minta/videos/6827109 crítica no bodyspace (review) http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/6517029 Aqui está, provavelmente a última crítica a Minta & The Brook Trout a sair em 2009, e é bem simpática. Escrita pelo Nuno Catarino, do Bodyspace. "A música de Minta & The Brook Trout é assim: curiosa, poética, pouco óbvia, cativante." Leiam mais por lá. Até breve, Francisca -------- Hey there, The link quoted above is to a really nice review that was just posted on bodyspace.net, written by Nuno Catarino. "Minta & The Brook Trout's music is like that: curious, poetic, unexpected, enthralling", it says. You can read a full translation below. Cheers, Francisca «After the brief debut EP You —five songs only, but enough to draw some attention — the songwriter Francisca Cortesao, a girl born in Porto who passed through Casino and now accounts for the alter-ego Minta, recently presented a more daring record, long-playing and self-released. Having recently been selected to play in David Fonseca’s band (replacing Rita Redshoes), this is Francisca’s more personal investment. Her new band — revamped— is called The Brook Trout and has Mariana Ricardo (formerly with Pinhead Society, most recently with a solo act and part of the new samba duo Domingo no Quarto) on bass, ukulele and vocals, Manuel Dordio (of Jesus The Misunderstood, Walter Benjamin and also Domingo no Quarto) on guitar and Jose Vilao on drums and percussion. The record also has some deluxe guests: Walter Benjamin, vocals, guitar and co-authorship of “I Do not Want To”; BlackBambi (Miguel Bonneville, of UrMaa), vocals, and Joao Cabrita, saxophone. For those who know the EP You, the formula of this new work keeps the same coordinates, with minor changes in the details: a folk sensibility is clear, the combination of music and lyrics works very well and Francisca’s voice — unique — stands out. The arrangements are discreet but effective. Where You already gave a good impression, Minta & The Brook Trout is more robust and represents an important step in this singer-songwriter’ career, from the revelation to the confirmation status. To make identification easier, we can hold on to names of the female folk universe — like Beth Orton, Cat Power and Fiona Apple — but Minta doesn’t closely resemble any of them, her songs sound downright original. On the cover of the album, two geese standing on a porch in the middle of the forest are watching the horizon. Minta & The Brook Trout's music is like that: curious, poetic, unexpected, enthralling, like Joao Maio Pinto’s artwork.» Nuno Catarino, Bodyspace.net, December 2009 ]]> Wed, 02 Dec 2009 03:48:16 -0800 http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/6517029 concertos a norte http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/6458417 Nuno Pessoa, o mais novo Brook Trout, bateria e voz. Ide, e avisai os vossos amigos nortenhos — nós agradecemos! Minta & The Brook Trout: cdgo (showcase, a solo), 4 de Dezembro, 18h Passos Manuel, 4 de Dezembro, 23h Convívio Guimarães, 5 de Dezembro, 23h59 mais informações: cdgo | passos manuel | convívio guimarães]]> Sun, 29 Nov 2009 11:10:28 -0800 http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/6458417 Reviews needed! http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/6284196 Minta & The Brook Trout? Or the first one, You? Do you have an opinion about the music we've been making? If so, please write a review on cd baby and post it. It will make people want to listen, even if you say it sounds awful. Your help will be greatly appreciated. :) Thanks! Francisca ]]> Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:37:23 -0800 http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/6284196 banho maria? qual banho, maria? (no, we're not taking a break!) http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/5944485 talvez já tenham sabido, eu — francisca cortesão, minta — fui convidada para fazer parte da banda que acompanha ao vivo o david fonseca. são óptimas notícias! o desmentido: não, isto não quer dizer que minta & the brook trout esteja em banho maria. de todo! acabámos de editar um disco e temos muita vontade de mostrar as novas músicas a quem as queira ouvir. temos concertos marcados para dezembro (porto e guimarães) e em 2010 vamos tocar mais. vão passando por aqui para saber as datas. há tempo para tudo! a mariana ricardo, o manuel dordio e o zé vilão também se desdobram em várias bandas — somos assim, multifacetados. :) vemo-nos por aí! francisca ----- hi there, the text above is just to let you know that: yes, i — francisca cortesao, aka minta — am going to be playing live in david fonseca's band. yay! no, that doesn't mean that minta & the brook trout are taking a break. we just released an album and want to play the new songs as much as we can. all of the brook trout also play with many other people — that's just the way we are, we excel at multitasking :) see you out there! francisca]]> Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:29:08 -0800 http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/5944485 BLITZ — Crítica a Minta & The Brook Trout (review) http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/5826501 Minta & The Brook Trout publicada na edição de Outubro da BLITZ, aqui. Aproveito para agradecer a todos os que têm passado por aqui. Até breve, Francisca ------- Hi! BLITZ magazine posted their review of Minta & The Brook Trout, which had been published on its October number. Here's a translation, for those of you who have yet to learn Portuguese. :) By the way, thanks for stopping by. Cheers, Francisca «Minta: Minta & The Brook Trout. 4/5 Crackling Folk Music Francisca Cortesao, a Portuguese girl born in the noble city of Oporto and who’s been living in Lisbon for the past ten years, when she led the now long gone band Casino, found the name “Minta” in the pages of a novel by Virginia Woolf. She chose it for her solo venture because of its ambiguity, and she has released two fables by this dreamy character since: You, the 2008 EP and Minta & The Brook Trout, the first album, in which she finds herself surrounded by a band that is particularly well suited to build a nest for unpretentious and detail and melody ridden folk songs. The influences are there (Cat Power, Laura Veirs, Aimee Mann) but, guided by Francisca Cortesao’s warm and driven voice, great songs like “Large Amounts”, “I Don’t Want To” or “On Lust” display a personality which is their own, and make for one of the best Portuguese albums of the Year. Lia Pereira, BLITZ, October 2009» ]]> Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:31:26 -0700 http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/5826501 Ípsilon — entrevista e crítica (interview and LP review) http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/5737274 entrevista sobre e crítica ao disco novo, Minta & The Brook Trout. Hi, For those of you who can't read Portuguese, here's a translation of the interview and review on the new album Minta & The Brook Trout which came out on last week's Ípsilon (Público). Cheers, Francisca «The first album of the rest of Minta’s life Minta, Francisca Cortesao, explains that she wonders about people and their relationships with one another. On “Minta & The Brook Trout”, we listen to the beginning of her second life. Where does it start? It starts with the cover of “Minta & The Brook Trout”, which is what we see first. We find out where it comes from. Francisca Cortesao is listening to a Tom Waits song on her iPod, “The part you throw away”, and listening in it to something she hadn’t noticed before: “On a Portuguese saloon”, the whiskey-ridden bard sings somewhere. So there’s Francisca, a little while later, finding a conversation between Waits and Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam on the web. Gilliam tells Waits that he writes funny lyrics. Like: “On a porch, the geese salute”. Waits laughs, and explains that what he’s singing is actually “On a Portuguese saloon” — but adds that “on a porch, the geese salute” is even better. Francisca thought so too and that’s why, on the cover of Minta & The Brook Trout, which follows the EP “You” and is Minta’s debut album, what we see is precisely geese on a porch. They were “ordered” from Joao Maio Pinto e they don’t look as amusing as we thought they would from Terry Gilliam’s misinterpretation. Which, by the way, makes perfect sense. The simple lines and the isolated landscape are a good match to Minta’s music (Francisca Cortesao and her band: Manuel Dordio, guitar, Mariana Ricardo, bass, backing vocals and ukulele, and Jose Vilao, drums). Joao Maio Pinto got it exactly right. So this is where it starts. An acoustic guitar, followed by a voice. A sing-along joined by an ukulele, an electric guitar which swings between the words, a gentle rhythm of bass and drums and the lines that walk through the song: “Give it up for those who have the guts / to hurt who they love / when they really have to”. Humour may inhabit Francisca Cortesao’s life, not so much her music. She tells us she’s fond of Roald Dahl’s short stories (among other books, he wrote “Charlie and The Chocolate Factory”), that she’s into the kind of dark humour that does not call for immediate laughter. She then adds: “Sometimes I’m sorry I don’t make music with a bit more humour, which is something I really like in literature and film”. “Oh well”, she sighs, “maybe I’ll get there”. While she doesn’t she has a whole world to explorer. Better still, all of the world — yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s, quoting Jose Cid for no good reason. Second life The stuff of Francisca Cortesao’s songs is right there: «I wonder about people and their relationships to each other. I’ve always turned to music to try and understand things that aren’t right in my own life. That’s all I know how to write about.” Don’t read some existentialist smothering life into this, don’t think of a bitter and permanently introspective woman. Francisca Cortesao doesn’t fit into the singer-songwriter stereotype, obsessed with life’s unbearable darkness. Nor, for that matter, does her music, where you couldn’t fit flying cutlery and screaming around the house. She, who tells us of Laura Veirs and Lambchop, of Lisa Germano and Elliott Smith, of today’s Gillian Welch and yesterday’s Graham Parsons, questions and looks into, tells stories that are always the same story, from a different perspective. The talent lies, of course, in the way in of turning this to songs that trick us — these “old” stories she tells us sound new. Summing it up and repeating it all, it is thus here that it all begins. At “on a porch the geese salute” and the music that lies behind it. Is that it? Not exactly. This Francisca Cortesao we see playing in small venues, she who chose to make her album debut through a self-released edition, has, in a way, been walking backwards. When this decade began, she could be found on EMI’s catalogue. She was 17 years old and was in a band called Casino, with Filipe Pacheco. She recorded an album she can’t listen to these days, she played in big venues, she opened for Silence 4 and thought all of it was too much: “We had no experience playing live, I sang out of tune and it made me mad that I was too nervous to be able to sing any better”. Everything happened at the wrong time. The album hit the stores right after 9-11, they were two kids with no background and the music industry was starting to show signs of the commercial agony it’s in today. They recorded another album that never got released (that one she can still listen to) and, frustrated, they disbanded. Francisca vanished from the public eye and continued writing songs for no one. And then this new world of MySpace and such things took over and she was able to show them. Thus began this second life, which, if you examine it carefully, is really her first. “A few years ago, I wouldn’t be able to single out five Portuguese bands I really liked”, she admits. “Right now it’s easy”. It isn’t by chance that we find Manuel Dordio and Walter Benjamin, of Jesus The Misunderstood, and Mariana Ricardo in her record — their band and her songs are “two of the things” Francisca enjoys listening to the most these days. There’s more: “People got rid of the notion that to be able to get to a given point you had to go through a major like EMI or Universal. There are other ways to get around that don’t have to do with the approval of people who don’t make music, who are older than you are and who see things in a very different way, and who try to force you into this narrow space which is their idea of how it should be done”. Her point: “Musicians today are doing exactly what they feel like doing and, strangely enough, they are finding there’s an audience for that”. So, and lastly, this is where it all begins. “Minta & The Brook Trout”, “on a porch, the geese salute”. Short and concise songs in which stories are told, not regretted. Never truly fragile, elegantly melancholy songs.» Mário Lopes in ípsilon (Público), October 23rd 2009. .... «Review: “Minta & The Brook Trout”. 3.5/5 From the EP to the album everything got clearer. Minta just turns to an acoustic guitar and an electric guitar that is sounds like a second speech over the vocals (courtesy of Manuel Dordio, of Jesus the Misunderstood, magnificent). A bass and another guitar appear, other times even that isn’t necessary — and here and there, when the song calls for it, Mariana Ricardo grabs the ukulele and Joao Cabrita plays a low-profile saxophone. With everything much clearer, this melancholy dance is best revealed, this insistence upon understanding why things that should go right go wrong — and then “it’s a waste of time to talk” and “this is leading us nowhere” (in “To Disappear”). On Minta & The Brook Trout we hear country-rock tinted by a pop longing (“If You Choose To Run”), a Nordic gracefulness in the vocal harmonies and gentle rhythms of “Without It”, we hear, a summary of all that is going on, “Dream Of You”, repeated like a non-Buddhist mantra. The elegance and simplicity of the arrangements make for one half of what pulls us in. The other half is this obsessive curiosity about people (all of us), by the mysteries of loves and lost loves that are our daily occupation since we first set foot on earth.» Mário Lopes in ípsilon (Público), October 23rd 2009. ]]> Mon, 26 Oct 2009 06:36:30 -0700 http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/5737274 Minta & The Brook Trout http://virb.com/minta/photos/5518956 ]]> Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:54:43 -0700 http://virb.com/minta/photos/5518956 Minta & The Brook Trout http://virb.com/minta/photos/5518948

Mariana RIcardo

]]> Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:53:39 -0700 http://virb.com/minta/photos/5518948 Minta & The Brook Trout http://virb.com/minta/photos/5518938

Miguel Bonneville

]]> Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:52:36 -0700 http://virb.com/minta/photos/5518938 Minta & The Brook Trout http://virb.com/minta/photos/5518932

Francisca Cortesão

]]> Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:51:25 -0700 http://virb.com/minta/photos/5518932 LP Out Now! http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/5231637 joao maio pinto. It comes in several colours, ten to be precise. It's a brand new record, eleven new songs recorded in July. You can already buy Minta & The Brook Trout at some friendly stores in Portugal, such as Flur, Louie Louie or Livraria Trama, in Lisbon or Jojo's Music, in Porto, or trough these store's websites. By the end of October, Compact Records will be distributing it to the bigger stores. I hope you enjoy listening to the album as much as we enjoyed recording it. Cheers! Francisca

]]> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:45:54 -0700 http://virb.com/minta/posts/text/5231637 Without It http://virb.com/minta/audio/445202 Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:27:04 -0700 http://virb.com/minta/audio/445202 I Don't Want To http://virb.com/minta/audio/443980 Minta & The Brook Trout ft Walter Benjamin

]]> Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:43:41 -0700 http://virb.com/minta/audio/443980 On Lust http://virb.com/minta/audio/443006 Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:36:54 -0700 http://virb.com/minta/audio/443006 Large Amounts http://virb.com/minta/audio/438894 Thu, 13 Aug 2009 07:57:28 -0700 http://virb.com/minta/audio/438894 minta &the brook trout http://virb.com/minta/photos/4063201

minta &the brook trout: outside at golden pony studio, lisbon, july '09: francisca cortesao, manuel dordio, mariana ricardo (jose vilão not pictured). polaroid by eduardo vinhas

]]> Sun, 02 Aug 2009 15:27:49 -0700 http://virb.com/minta/photos/4063201 Minta ft Walter Benjamin @ O Século, March 2009 (©Vera Marmelo, Rua de Baixo) http://virb.com/minta/photos/3770962 ]]> Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:14:55 -0700 http://virb.com/minta/photos/3770962