20 Years × 180 Minutes

In April 2023, Crónica was invited to celebrate its twenty years of ongoing activity at Rádio Eira — eira.osso.pt — a project by the OSSO collective that broadcasts in FM for the local communities in São Gregório and Caldas da Raínha, Portugal. The first hour of this broadcast was dedicated to a conversation between OSSO’s Ricardo Jacinto and Nuno Morão and Crónica’s Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela, a talk focused on the label’s activity and on collaborating, curating, and publishing experimental music and sound art in an ever-changing context. Following that, Carvalhais and Tudela conducted a three-hour live broadcast that revisited each of the more than 200 releases in Crónica’s catalogue.

This mix was more than a walk down memory lane. Taking each year of Crónica’s history as a unit, the mix developed an archaeology of the label, a retrospective and critical look that framed every release in its chronological context while also trying to understand them in the present. This was a look at the past with sights set on the future of continuing to publish, help produce, and distribute new music.

20 Years × 180 Minutes was selected and mixed by Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela in April 2023. The final track was updated in September 2023 to include all the year’s releases. Crónica would like to thank OSSO and Rádio Eira, Ricardo Jacinto and Nuno Morão, and acknowledge the work of all the artists who collaborated with Crónica since 2003.