Created in 2007 by Eduardo Raon (harp and electronics), Joana Sá (piano and electronics) and Luís J Martins (guitar and electronics), Powertrio is the experimental laboratory where the creative work of the three musicians began to take shape, and where the three emerge both as as individual artistic voices and as a collective one. Its rare instrumental combination allows POWERTRIO to develop a unique sound, taking advantage of the idiomatics of each instrument as well as of the vast “chamberistic” possibilities of this ensemble. Aware of classical music’s legacy, POWERTRIO uses and subverts contemporary musical archetypes, logics and solutions questioning and seeking integration of crossmedia resources. Formed by three composers/interpreters with classical background and vast experience in other musical genres, its motto has been, ever since its inception, to combine the poetics and complexity of contemporary music with the urgency, immediacy and immersion in sound of the most sonic rock approaches. With an intense international activity between 2007 and 2015, the trio has released three albums: Di Lontan (Clean feed, 2014), What We Think When We Walk and What We Walk While Thinking (Creative Sources, 2009) and Four improvisations (CENTA, 2008).

In 2024, for the first time since 2015, POWERTRIO played live. In the meantime, however, all of its members have been collaborating in different ways ever since POWERTRIO’s foundation: in the creation of different formations (such as the turbamulta quintet) or the collaborations in which Eduardo mixes records by Joana or Luís. Powertrio is, however, a life project for all the members, and therefore, from time to time, the return to this embryonic trio format is needed. In 2024, in the urgency and complexity of the times in which the 50 years of the carnation revolution and of democracy are celebrated in Portugal, POWERTRIO gathered again for the premiere of its new performance ‘50 : urgent countdown’ – reflecting and resonating with these times. News about this project soon!

The horizon line, a mountain's profile or a curve on a beach, set out the sand's sparkling fabric, and too of the ice, and the mirrored stars far away on the sea. Ancient lights, old rock sediments, unique and unpredictable ephemeral snow flakes cause that unstable and bright sparkling which is, after all, a sign of life in inanimate things.
Di Lontan is a fragment of Joana, Luís and Eduardo's life. They reunited in 2014 to give birth to a bright, transparent new music in which the energy of each note, idea, of all sounds is featured in its plenitude. Improvisation is still the driving force behind their sounds' succulence. Sometimes blazing, explosive. It comes wrapped in subtle forms that ensure a continuum, simultaneously delicate and effective. It is sparkling due to its ability to overcome the sound fingerprint of all three instruments - guitar, harp and piano - the characteristic attack-decay. Powertrio invents itself a new nature, coming out of new materials and composed resonances, accomplishing a thorough and flowered granular aesthetics. An encounter, empathy, tolerance, freedom - the music of three musicians. These three musicians.
Intertwined accelerations of smooth isorhythmic patterns, in the beginning of À Flor do Mal, lead to a granular music able to water down harmonies into sound clouds. In O Nervo e a Outra Dança a harp's thick, low melody, a distant passacaglia reminiscence, is revealed as an anticipated resonance, then swallowed by an epic and evolving crackling just to, in the very end, give place to a few fluted electronic arpeggios as fascinating as delicate. Di Lontan fa Specchio il Mare is a sort of “detachment and sentiment” as defined by Manuel Pedro Ferreira, but in Powertrio's version and interpretation the memory of the fixed, hieratic sound material is further defied in the lengthening of times. If, on one hand, Di Lontan begins with a decay/resonance without attack, on the other hand, the echo of all heard so far is glimpsed in the stretched constructed resonance that abruptly ends Divertimento, a piece full of life, breathing among waves and particles, both diatonic and percussive.
Guilherme Proença