Luís Coelho’s musical work, which includes his own original compositions, is based on the sounds of the Portuguese guitar, classical guitar, double-bass and harp, presenting a sound landscape inspired by both traditional Portuguese music and erudite music, seeking to achieve a balance on the borderline between the two. His first album – Contos de Cordas, with Salomé Pais Matos on harp and Carlos Menezes on double-bass – was published and released by the Fado Museum.

«Abandoning the Portuguese guitar led me to form a dialectic relationship with it. When you give yourself up to it, you become inebriated by its distinctive tone and often imagine words in the groans and screaming sounds coming from its strings, as if the guitar itself were talking to you… It can be so enchanting that you find yourself being transported to a time when the oral traditions – and the stories that were told – made you look inside yourself and at your own destiny (or fado). The strings of the Portuguese guitar have this enchantment of “once upon a time” that inflames you with passion and which is documented here through the intimate language of the stories, in a narrative developed from the strings of the Portuguese guitar, the harp and the double-bass, with some hints of the fado guitar and the hurdy-gurdy.» Luís Coelho