Garden Sessions

The garden is a real garden — a wall of bougainvillea at the back, lit from above, set up as a simple recording space. Not a stage, not a music venue: homely, cosy, unpretentious.

It started almost by accident. I recorded my cousin Luis Roquette here just for fun — and when we looked back at the footage, it was clearly worth doing again. My wife and I talked it over and decided it would be a great idea to start inviting people over to record.

No money has ever changed hands. The idea was always a simple, pleasant evening — dinner, a couple of glasses of wine, some music — in exchange for a decent recording each of us could use: I got to keep experimenting with lighting, video and sound, and the musicians walked away with something they could actually use to launch a track. Over time it leaned toward indie musicians who don't have the budget to record anywhere else.

The other half of it is that I wanted to build nice, cinematic frames, and I needed a subject — I didn't have a story or a plot in mind, so I turned to musicians instead.

Every session runs on multiple cameras, lights and microphones, feeding into a Tascam Model 12. But what stays with me most isn't the gear — it's that nobody was ever made to feel like they were performing. Just friends, relaxed, having a good time, with a camera quietly pointed at them.