A figure with a discreet yet continuously substantial presence in the musical scene of this town, Tó Trips has already accumulated nearly four decades of work with the guitar, in a rare case of benign resilience and constant inventiveness. With foundations in Amen Sacristi during the Rock Rendez-Vous era, now reconfigured in the memory of those rebellious times under the shadow of the European Economic Community (EEC), he passed through the seminal bands Santa Maria and Gasolina em Teu Ventre by Jorge Ferraz, before founding Lulu Blind. An iconic band of a certain sonic youth that spread throughout the country during the 1990s, they left behind a respectable legacy of three albums, flirting with mainstream media exposure and memories of incendiary concerts.

It is with the formation of Dead Combo, alongside the late Pedro Gonçalves, that we first hear those chords. A duo that simply defined itself as "music with Lisbon inside," and over the course of 18 years—until Gonçalves’s premature death—created a reflection of that same Lisbon—and, by extension, this country—open to other worlds, a host to languages and cultures. In the music of Dead Combo, and particularly in his guitar, the ghost of Carlos Paredes haunted the lyricism of Ennio Morricone, the landscapes of Ry Cooder gave way to the fervor of flamenco, and the Cuban groove, twisted by Marc Ribot, fueled the Lisbon bohemia, intertwining stories and latitudes in a way that was as honest as it was uniquely his own.

A guitar with people inside, just like the master Paredes’, populated by memories and experiences, which first showed its openly autobiographical traits with his solo debut—Guitarra 66. A raw and luminous album released by Mbari in 2009, where Trips projected a very intuitive multicultural crossover in both form and approach, as someone who inhabits both the real and the imaginary with equal fervor. Simultaneously, he expanded his language through occasional collaborations and projects, in a natural consequence of his continuous quest for broader horizons, never narrow-minded or confined to his own formula. In 2015, he released his second solo album through Mbari: Guitarra Makaka - Danças a um Deus Desconhecido (Dances to an Unknown God). The album, recorded with a Resonator guitar—an instrument typically associated with blues via Bukka White—is here reinterpreted in an equally instinctive way, but distant from the genre's canon. Again, a very personal imaginative world.

Fast forward to 2023, with the soundtrack for Surdina by Rodrigo Areias and the formation of Club Makumba mediating these past eight years more than adequately, Tó Trips releases his third album through Revolve, the result of three years of work. Titled Popular Jaguar, it draws inspiration from the animal, which moves in the shadows, to build small instrumental stories lived by the author, marking his most autobiographical work and the first to be released after Dead Combo.