The first of many

On June 13th, 2026 — a day after Dia dos Namorados (Brazilian Valentine’s Day) and, ironically, on the feast of Saint Anthony, the matchmaker saint — we played our first show in São Paulo (and of our lives). This is a special story.

LUDUS officially began in November 2024, more or less around the same time Luís and I were growing closer — as friends, and as lovers too. We wrote our first songs back then (some of them are part of this very release), and we’ve been shaping our purpose and our poetics over these last two years, as we also discovered ourselves as partners and as artists creating together. It’s been quite an experience, quite a journey — ups and downs, plenty of changes of route, of thinking, of reassessing — and, above all, a lot of courage and perseverance to believe in our vision, and in the connection with the world we’re reaching for through it.

Anyway: throughout 2025 we loved and worked half at a distance — on the São Paulo–Florianópolis bridge — until, in August, Luís came to live with me in São Paulo and we set our base. At the start of this year, 2026, we decided we’d travel in the second half of the year, alongside an artist residency, and work as digital nomads for a while. So I gave up the apartment I’d lived in from 2024 until early 2026, and we spent the two months left before the trip in a new place, two blocks from the old one, where my brother lives. One day, walking down the street of this new home, a few blocks down, we passed a little blue-and-red house called SINA CAFÉ. Having just settled on those as the colors of our manifesto, finding that space felt like a huge call — a synchronicity from the universe. We went in, met the owner of this super cool café in Jardins — Villa — and talked with him about our release, our project, and the wish to put on a show to bring the work into the world. Neighbors in the same neighborhood, it was about two months of preparing for this show — intimate, voice and guitar, for friends — which happened on a Saturday morning.

It’s where we shot the cover of our EP and, between so many run-ins on the street, that place became deeply symbolic — a key point in this beginning and ending of a cycle. We’ll come back to São Paulo, but we probably won’t live on the same street as Sina anymore.

The show was beautiful. We leaned so much on the presence of our friends who — special and attentive — pour themselves into supporting our work, for now, while we still don’t have an audience of our own. We’re a community of artists and musicians a bit on the outskirts of the São Paulo bubble, trying to hold on outside the spotlight while dreaming of one day having our own place in the scene. All these friends — or most of them — I met at the music production college I moved to São Paulo for, 5 years ago. They were the greatest gift of that course, which urgently needs a rethink… lol.

The first of many. I’ll admit that, after 2 years standing still — no shows, not putting myself out there — showing my face was so freeing. I felt confident, and like I belonged here again — something so precious and beautiful to share, all the more with my partner in life and in the everyday. I think our work is really special to us, and believing in your own art might just be half the road already walked.

Thank you to everyone who cares and is reading this — to the friends and to the strangers. From here, we begin a new chapter of this journey, outside Brazil for a few months. We hope to have red-hot news to share soon.

Hasta luego,
Ludus.