We Speak Music
Muca & Celeste release ‘Like This Before’ with added Roberto Menescal
Muca’s first collaboration with Menescal was 2021’s ‘Until We Meet Again’ which featured Alice SK on vocals. The track received incredible feedback from the likes of Songwriting Magazine & Songlines Magazine and BBC airplay with an interview with Robert Elms. The song has now reached over 1 million streams worldwide, so it feels like the right time for Muca to follow it up with new Menescal collaboration, ‘Like This Before’.
‘Like This Before’ has a modern and lively approach that pays homage to its Brazilian roots and the Bossa Nova style. The combination of the infamous acoustic guitar style of one of the only remaining living legends and pioneers of Bossa Nova, Roberto Menescal and Celeste Caramanna’s soft and sumptuous vocals is like honey on the ears and the collaboration shows how a sixty-year-old genre is still so special and still resonates with both old & young minds. The groove from Roberto’s guitar work sits beautifully behind the melody, with Muca’s fine skill of fusing the old and new wrapping the track up into quite a unique piece of music.
Muca specifically flew to Rio to record the track with Menescal. Once the recordings were done, Muca handpicked the right singer for the song. The only name that came to mind for this song was Celeste. Making the decision was easy; Muca saw Celeste for the first time on the same night he first met Menescal at Pizza Live Express Live in London. Celeste appeared with Menescal and sang a track with him that night. Both Menescal & Muca agreed that she would be the best vocalist for this track. Celeste then worked on the lyrics and recorded the vocals with Muca in London.
About the song and the experience, Celeste explains, ‘It’s simply amazing, unbelievable… because Roberto Menescal is a reference for everyone, he’s a piece of history… and I feel a lot of respect, admiration and gratefulness for what he’s done… he’s part of something that became very important in my life… it’s incredible for me to think of myself working with him, I couldn’t ever expect that to happen one day’.
Returning to the experience of recording with Menescal and what comes next, Muca says: ‘These couple of tracks I recorded were a game changer for me, and the experience of recording with Menescal was one of the strongest music experiences I’ve ever had. And because of that, I couldn’t stop thinking of inviting him to record an album together, which he not only accepted but said he was really happy to do so. I can’t believe that it is happening.’
Murillo Sguillaro, better known as Muca, is a Brazilian musician and producer living in London. He has built a modest following that looks set to explode once his new musical adventures unfold in the coming months and ‘Like This Before’ is just the beginning. Prepare to be transported somewhere beyond Ipanema Beach and London Fields on a bright sunny day!
Michele Ducci has unveiled the second single, ‘Woman Like You’, from his forthcoming album and animated film ‘Snail in the Clouds’.
‘Woman Like You’ pairs bright distorted electric guitar with an electronic drumbeat, adding in Ducci’s soulful vocals and a catchy uplifting chorus with Letizia Mandoleisi’s sweet vocal harmonies. A vintage organ pedalboard operated by Ducci simultaneously generates chords, bass and rhythm, like a one-man band. Shane Kennedy (Girl in the Year Above) joins in on guitar. Simon Milner (Is Tropical, Ysing) recorded and produced the track at his 4am Studios in London.
The album and film tell the story of a planet called ‘Snail’, inhabited by hybrids – primarily a mixture between scorpions, snails and humans – who lead a life according to the style of Pythagoras, devoted to music. There is also a cloud man named Agostos, a writer of musical operettas, who together with a talking smoke machine called Doctor Subtilis, begins to kill all hybrids, targeting in particular the hybrid musician Diodoros and his band, in an effort to steal the ark of melodies, an ancient ship that allows the whole planet to survive with music and joy.
The video for the single, created and animated by Ducci and Mandoleisi, delves further into the realm of planet ‘Snail’:
Says Ducci, “The ark of melodies, after various attempts, finally starts to work and fly in the planet Snail, while the shady Doc. Sub. and Agostos, with their platoon of soldiers made of foggy smoke, spy the miracle, planning to steal the ark for their evil and tyrannical purposes.”
About the track, Michele says, “I wrote this song for my love Letizia. Love seen from the mind is the sound we make. Sound is the love of matter.
We used a Technics synthesizer organ from a flea market. I tried to find a mood that was right for the song and I started using the bass of the pedal board together with the synth and the drums, and it was magical to hear the song reveal itself all coming from a single instrument. Leti was singing with me and we recorded everything live in one shot. Then we made Shane do the guitar flight, as if he came out of the window. The idea was to maintain disproportions, guitar thrust and synth drum thinness a la Haroumi Hosono, so as to create an estrangement, but naturally: it’s about how I listen, with close up something that captures me in its nuance as element of a larger orchestra somewhere. I’m glad we decided in the studio with Simon to use the layers of arrangement as the close-ups in the cinema; they look like strange enlargements that perch on parts of a mutated orchestra. I’m happy to come back with this love song at a time when everything seems to opt, even my labor in managing the flows of selfishness that have poured out on me while doing this album, for the sound of war. I’m here happy to be able to say that the sound of love always wins as did for me. Snail in the clouds is one of the most important works in my life and I am glad to start from pure love for this album that is my son.”
The album and full-length film will be released on the 5th of June on Monotreme Records.
Michele and Letizia’s previous musical short film, ‘The Great Book of Nature’, is an official selection for the 2026 Venice Shorts Film Festival.
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