Portico Quartet

Portico Quartet – Memory Streams (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 44:50 minutes | 536 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Gondwana Records

“For better or worse”, says Duncan Bellamy, the drummer from Portico Quartet, “we have always been a group that’s quite isolated from others. We’ve never really felt linked to any scene since the day we began making music.” Since their formation in 2005, the British group have always occupied a unique space in the “young British scene”, a kind of catch-all marketing term. Spotted by Peter Gabriel who signed them to his label Real World, the group attracted the spotlight with their jazz that was infused with post-rock, ethnic influences and repeated sounds, using the technological evolution as one of the cornerstones of their project. From Radiohead to the label ECM, from E.S.T. to Steve Reich, and even exploring Burial-style dubstep and Brian Eno’s ambient sounds, Portico Quartet have never been faint-hearted. True to form, Memory Streams is rooted in these values and influences without ever being samey.
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Portico Quartet – Art in the Age of Automation (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 50:36 minutes | 597 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Gondwana Records

Mercury Prize-nominated Portico Quartet has always been an impossible band to pin down. Sending out echoes of jazz, electronica, ambient music and minimalism, the group created their own singular, cinematic sound over the course of three studio albums, from their 2007 breakthrough ‘Knee-Deep in the North Sea’, and 2010 John Leckie produced ‘Isla’, to the self titled record ‘Portico Quartet’ in 2012. Now rebooted as Portico Quartet after a brief spell as the three-piece Portico, the group are set to release their fourth studio album Art In The Age Of Automation this August on Manchester’s forward thinking indy jazz and electronica label Gondwana Records. It’s an eagerly anticipated return, with the band teasing both a return to their mesmeric signature sound and fresh new sonic departures in their new music.
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Portico Quartet – Terrain (Extended) – Live in Studio One: An Abbey Road 90th Session (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 50:04 minutes | 961 MB | Genre: Contemporary Jazz, Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Gondwana Records

A year ago Abbey Road celebrated its 90th anniversary. On this occasion, a festival had been organized and many artists invited. Among them, Portico Quartet, who had then taken advantage of the event to record a concert film of their album Terrain. The band then formed as an ensemble, alongside a string quartet, and plays a more extended version of the album. This exercise and this new configuration offered them the opportunity to explore their own creation in more depth and to give much more textures to their compositions.
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Portico Quartet – Monument (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 44:02 minutes | 475 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Gondwana Records

Portico Quartet announce Monument, the electronic driven follow-up to their acclaimed ambient-minimalist suite Terrain, presenting the band at their most direct.
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Portico Quartet – Terrain (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 38:45 minutes | 436 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Gondwana Records

Portico Quartet announce Terrain, a three-part suite drawing on American minimalism and ambient music alongside their own rich heritage as they explore new musical vistas.

When Duncan Bellamy and Jack Wyllie – the driving force behind Portico Quartet got together in their East London studio in May 2020 and started work on the music that would become their new album, the world, or most of it, was in the midst of the first lockdown. The unique impact of the events of 2020 became the backdrop to their time composing and recording; causing them to take stock, re-think, and plot a new musical path.

Indian novelist Arundhati Roy expressed the sense of grief and rupture from the pandemic as “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next”, and as they created the music that would become Terrain they were drawn towards longer, slowly unfolding pieces, which are perhaps the most artistically free and also the most beautiful they have ever made.
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Portico Quartet – Knee-Deep In The North Sea (2010)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 42:15 minutes | 495 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Real World Records

2008 Mercury Prize Nominee! Portico Quartet are four young musicians from South London who sound like nothing you’ve ever heard before. Living and playing together they describe their ethos as like an Indy band that plays post-Jazz, and their unique sound has won them fans from Gilles Peterson and Notion to BBC Music Magazine, and made them Time Out’s Jazz, Folk and World music album of the year. Bable.

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Portico Quartet – Next Stop (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 19:42 minutes | 220 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Gondwana Records

Portico Quartet announce Next Stop, a dynamic 4 track EP recorded at the same sessions as 2021’s acclaimed Monument release.
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Portico Quartet – Untitled (AITAOA #2) (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 31:54 minutes | 377 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Gondwana Records

Portico Quartet has always been an impossible band to pin down. Sending out echoes of jazz, electronica, ambient music and minimalism, the group have created their own singular sound.And while their new music mixes dense layers and textures with electronic and acoustic instruments the sound remains uniquely, recognisably their own.

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Portico Quartet – We Welcome Tomorrow (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 13:24 minutes | 150 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Gondwana Records

The EP follows on from Memory Streams, their fifth studio album and second for Gondwana Records which was released in October 2019. Sonically it explores a similar world to the full-length album, but where Memory Streams focused on a punchier live sound, WWT explores modern classical and ambient textures.

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Portico Quartet – Portico Quartet (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 56:19 minutes | 471 MB | Genre: Jazz
Official Digital Download – Source: bowers-wilkins.com

Portico Quartet sound like nothing you ever heard before. The Mercury nominated East London based outfit’s unique music has expanded to embrace new sonic territories. Drawing on the inspiration of electronica, ambient, classical and dance music as they take their strange, beautiful, cinematic, future music to exciting new vistas where the inspiration of Burial, Mount Kimbie and Flying Lotus rubs shoulders with the textures of Arve Henriksen and Bon Iver and echoes of Steve Reich and Max Richter. But all underpinned by a shared joy in collective music making as the band push their inimitable music into the future. (more…)