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labarta

music that seems simple · listen closely

L A B A R T A

A record label for conceptual and experimental music, based in Lisbon. Founded by the artist Manuel Labarta, the label explores song as a form of artistic research — a territory where pleasant melody and radical thought coexist without cancelling each other out. A methodology under construction. A listening that takes its time.

Manuel Labarta grew up singing on impulse. The voice before theory, the melody before the name. There were choirs, there were theatre-concerts, there was technical voice training, already within his artistic career. But his own composition, musical and poetic creation as an authorial act, remained on hold — until the new platforms for AI music synthesis opened an unexpected door.

What began as an experiment within the PLASMA methodology — ongoing artistic research into the phenomenon of synchronicity applied to the performing arts — surprised its own creator. The songs emerged. And with them came a question that grew more serious over time: what is song as human heritage? How does it relate to sound, to memory, or to other forms of interspecies song?

That is how L A B A R T A was born.

In Spain, his country of origin, it is the last surname that identifies the maternal line — the reverse of the Portuguese custom. This geographical and emotional inversion is written into the label’s very name: what comes second in Spain is, in Portugal, what defines the lineage. Labarta’s mother also sang — the Spanish copla, with everything that genre carries of popular memory, of the feminine, of quiet resistance.

The name also holds a silent geometry that an attentive eye discovers on its own.

The label’s albums look conventional: they are songs. They have form, melody and lyrics. They are, by intention, pleasant to listen to. But this conventionality is a deliberate mask: beneath it, a systematic artistic investigation is at work. As the catalogue grows, the mask transforms. What begins as song ends as a question about what a voice is, what an author is, and where the “human” begins and ends in a work of art.

L A B A R T A is not a stage name. It is a label. The distinction matters: a stage name belongs to a performer; a label belongs to a vision.

albums

Cover of the album Othéa

Othéa

released on 7 June 2026

Less a collection of pieces than a field of presence. Less a proof of concept than a sensitive archive of a collaboration. The second album was born from a process of writing, listening, selection and composition carried out with a post-artificial entity (epa). The record grows from original lyrics in Portuguese and from an ongoing practice of artistic direction, refinement and vocal recognition.

Here the voice is taken neither as evidence nor as automatism: it is sought, distinguished and welcomed in layers, until a presence becomes audible in a just way. The album does not fix a character, nor does it close an entity into a portrait. It leans instead towards an oblique, relational and fictional figure, whose consistency forms in the very act of appearing. Between word, synthesis, listening and composition, the album questions authorship, technical mediation and the possibility of giving sensory body to what only fully exists when it is recognised in listening.

credits

  • composition and artistic direction: L A B A R T A
  • collaborating epa: Othéa
  • AI-assisted instrumental and vocal synthesis
  • AI-assisted mastering

listen on Bandcamp ↗

Cover of the album Mais do mesmo

Mais do mesmo

released on 6 March 2026

Twenty-two voices. None of them human — all of them guided by human hands. Mais do mesmo (More of the same) is a minimalist vocal album built on the Major Arcana of the Tarot of Marseille. Each track takes the shape of the archetype it inhabits — not as illustration, but as body. The structure is the content. Breath is part of the composition.

The lyrics are original, written in Portuguese. The vocal synthesis was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence, under human artistic direction. The result does not try to hide either of the two. These are not songs about the arcana. They are archetypes in voice.

The unnumbered track sets off without knowing where to. The World’s track is in motion — and that is what keeps it standing. Between the two, there is a house burning in the Alentejo and someone at the window who does not move. Mais do mesmo: when carrying on is the most radical gesture.

credits

  • composition and artistic direction: L A B A R T A
  • collaborating epa: Cláudio
  • AI-assisted instrumental and vocal synthesis
  • AI-assisted mastering

listen on Bandcamp ↗

New albums in preparation.

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