His His

Toronto-based alt-folk musician Aidan Belo is a nostalgic person. Not so much in the sense of thinking everything was better in some way-back-when, but in the sense of carrying a deep curiosity toward the past, and an acute tuning to the strange, unfathomable mystery that is time passing. There’s a Portuguese word that helps to explain this: saudade. “That’s what the wives of sailors would use to describe this feeling while their husbands were gone at sea,” explains Belo. “There’s no direct English translation but it’s like longing, melancholy, nostalgia, all those things bundled up. I want to evoke those kinds of emotions.”

So when he started his alternative and experimental folk project His His in the fall of 2020, it was natural that the past (and all its constituent parts) was a character, an aesthetic, and a guiding principle of the project. Belo constructed a makeshift studio in an old barn located on his family’s farm in Schomberg, Ontario, a tiny farming community an hour north of Toronto where Belo’s father landed after immigrating from Portugal. Belo began recording there using a Tascam Portastudio 4-track cassette recorder, and over the next year, he released a string of singles and a debut EP, 2021’s appropriately named Garden Songs.