tekhnē #10 - João Polido

Bi-monthly insights into the activities of the European project tekhnē, which started in 2023. The series showcases a selection of artists who share and discuss their work and listen to recorded material. By putting the focus on the user rather than the developer, this project aims to explore the emancipatory potential of technology in music and sound art. Technology as an art of craft, appropriating and transforming existing tools, to imagine multiple ways of creative misuse. tekhnē is a collaborative project, co-funded by the European Union.

This episode features João Polido, a Portuguese musician, composer, and lecturer who investigates cultural memory, tradition, sound technology, and the socio-political history of music. The title of this talk, “Spectral Lore of Tradition”, emerges from his observation that, as oral memory fades from contemporary life (paradoxically aided by recorded media), traditional music and folklore become suspended in a kind of temporal loop.

Shaped by structures of power in Portugal’s history - particularly during the military dictatorship and its aftermath - these forms reveal complex dynamics of aural remembrance, abstraction, and reference. Framing remembering and forgetting as intertwined acts, Polido explores spectral processes in audio as both remediation and a strategy in the face of the failure of recognition. As Nagel and Wood write in “Anachronic Renaissance”: “There was no ‘original’, in other words, until someone tried but failed to replicate it.

The original was the creature of the replica.” This talk was held as part of the programme of OUT.FEST’s 21st edition, at Casa da Cidadania Cabós Gonçalves in Barreiro, Portugal, on the 3rd of October of 2025. The podcast is bookended by the tracks “Contours” and “Prova de Existência” by Polido, taken from his 2024 album Hearing Smoke (Holuzam).