Founded by Filipe Faria and Tiago Matias in 2012 anticipating the 110th anniversary of the death of post-impressionist artist Paul Gauguin’ (1848-1903) Noa Noa is a musical exploration of the frontiers of creative freedom that the artists from the 18th/19th century were aspiring to. This kind of creative freedom has parallels in the history of the western music of the 18th century during which period a musician was educated to sing, play more than one instrument, improvise, compose or conduct his or her own piece of music. The tradition of a free response to the creative appeal is as old as Man himself, and it seems to be felt again in recent modern practices of Early/World Music in comparison to the super-specialization in the 20th and 21st centuries. The rediscovery of historical instruments themselves and techniques required to play them have highlighted the past but at the same time served as an inspiration for contemporary composers.
In the Noa Noa project, Filipe Faria and Tiago Matias assume the role of the ancient musician, multifaceted and multi-instrumentalist, drawing on their substantial professional experience of almost two decades in the Early Music international scene, coupled with their penchant for such risky projects and the intimacy the music can reach.
In 2014 Noa Noa released its first CD dedicated to the collective memory of the different Iberian cultures and languages, a plaid of sounds “beyond the river Ebro” resulting in the Portuguese, Castilian, Mirandese, Galician, Asturian, Basque or Catalan languages. With the support of Ministry of Culture of Portugal, the General-Directorate for the Arts and the Municipality of Idanha-a-Nova, this project, called “Lingua (vol. 1)” (Lingua = Language/Tongue), ranges from the most common to the most distinctive aspects of the history of the Iberian culture. This CD achieved the first place of the TOP FNAC in the area of Classical Music/ World Music/Jazz for three months and was one of the best selling albums in Portugal between July and November 2014. In 2015 Noa Noa released it's second CD, the second volume of the project "Língua". In 2016 the project will release their third CD dedicated to the sephardic songs in ladino.
Since 2012 Noa Noa performed over 50 concerts in Portugal, France and Belgium in some iconic venues as Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbon, Portugal), the Flemish Opera (Ghent, Belgium), Bozar (Brussels, Belgium), DeSingel (Antwerp, Belgium) and Opera de Lille (Lille, France).