Entretela is Cristina Clara’s second album. Its title comes from the Portuguese word for interlining: the almost invisible layer of fabric that gives shape to what we see and quietly holds different materials together. It became the image at the heart of the record — a hidden structure connecting songs, experiences and musical languages that might, at first, seem to belong to different places.
Fado, morna, batuku, chula and orally transmitted songs pass through the same voice and the same lived experience. These are worlds Cristina Clara has inhabited over time — and that now inhabit her in return.
The album was made with musicians from Portugal, Brazil and Cape Verde, reflecting the human and musical landscape in which Clara has been moving in recent years. With lyrics in Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole, her growing closeness to the traditional music of these places is especially present, as is the physical language of hand percussion: the batuku and the adufe, deeply associated with women’s traditional music, and also the tracanholas - two simple pieces of wood made at home - are part of the record’s pulse as naturally as the voice itself.
Cristina Clara leads the artistic direction of Entretela, shaping its poetic, musical and aesthetic language as one continuous gesture. The repertoire, arrangements, original writing, visual universe and accompanying texts all carry a deeply personal point of view. That is perhaps where the album’s unity is most clearly felt: not in sameness, but in the unmistakable hand stitching its differences together.
At times, listening to Entretela can feel like walking through contemporary Lisbon in Cristina Clara’s shoes. You enter a fado house; a few streets later, musicians from different places are sharing a room. A Cape Verdean morna carries Portuguese guitar, perhaps played by someone coming straight from a night of fado; elsewhere, voices and percussion gather around a traditional song. Does it feel like moving between separate worlds — or like following one continuous musical life?
The guests emerge from that same culture of encounter. António Zambujo, one of the leading contemporary voices of fado; Sérgio Godinho, a major figure in Portuguese songwriting and literature; Tito Paris, one of the emblematic voices of Cape Verdean music; and Rolando Semedo, Clara’s bassist and close songwriting partner, are part of the record through relationships that already exist beyond it. The Roda de Percussão Ibérica, of which Clara is a founding member, brings in the collective energy of traditional percussion and another community that is already part of her musical life.
Alongside the songs, Clara wrote short chronicles and poetic notes — fragments of memory, atmosphere and context that offer other doors into the listening experience. Two are recorded as tracks on the album; the others appear in the booklet, with English translations available on her official website.
By the end, perhaps the most interesting question is not which tradition each song belongs to, but whether you can still hear the invisible thread running through them all.
Not a map of influences, but a lived geography.
«“This is a deeply personal record about the worlds music has allowed me to inhabit — and the invisible threads that keep us connected, through music and beyond it.”
— Cristina Clara»