There's a certain kind of artist who rises from the netlabel era—someone who came of age when sharing experimental music involved uploading MP3s to servers in distant countries, when community meant forum threads and Creative Commons licences. Jerome Faria is one of these artists, though to say he arose from that period would be to understate what he has achieved since.
Born in Madeira in 1983, Faria spent his formative years in Switzerland before returning to Portugal as a teenager. Piano and guitar came first, then drums—creating a rhythmic foundation that would influence even his most abstract work. By 2003, he had transitioned into electronic music, releasing as NNY through Enough Records, Test Tube, and MiMi. The music was confrontational: digital detritus reshaped into something urgent. His debut OFFEAR.EP (2004) established the template, followed by ECT (2005)—Indie Rock Mag praised it for "a particular talent for atmospheric progressions, interweaving ethereal instrumentals into an organic and hypnotic movement with the allure of a waking dream."
What's remarkable is how swiftly Faria moved from internet obscurity to festival stages. By 2005, he was performing at MADEIRADIG, sharing bills with Fennesz and Florian Hecker. He returned five more times over the following six years, each time with a more formidable group: Frank Bretschneider and Vladislav Delay in 2006-07, Alva Noto and Murcof in 2009, followed by the stacked 2011 lineup—including Tim Hecker, Oneohtrix Point Never, KTL, Deaf Center, and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. That edition saw Faria performing as a duo with Taylor Deupree. The Quietus described their collaboration as possessing "an almost romantic sound that recalls Eno's Discreet Music."
This wasn't the journey of a local artist occasionally granted access to international stages. Faria was positioned as a peer. The circuit expanded: EME in Lisbon, Störung in Barcelona, Olhares de Outono in Porto, Festival Migractions in Paris. In 2015, he opened for William Basinski in Lisbon. Bodyspace noted that he "oscillated skillfully between electronic doom and subtle ambient—at times liberating, at times punishing, at times meditative, at times abrupt."
By 2012, a shift had occurred. The transition from NNY to releases under his own name marked a turn towards patience, evident as early as the sparse compositions of 17:14 (2010) and fully realised in Overlapse (Enough Records, 2012)—drones that gradually unfurled, textures requiring sustained attention. Edição Limitada wrote that it felt "almost as if we were contemplating the machine, forced to escape its synthesised perfection, about to stumble upon itself at any moment."
Around this time, Faria started composing for film. His score for Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—first performed in 2013 with pianist Nuno Filipe and self-released on BRØQN in 2023—stands as the deepest expression of his compositional voice. Contrasting Wiene's angular expressionist nightmare, he crafted a dialogue spanning a century of sonic potential, honouring the film's unease while exploring territories the original could never have imagined. His other film work includes Invisible Other (2016), a reflection on modern solitude by Portuguese-Norwegian artist Margarida Paiva, and Aragão (2021), a theatre piece celebrating the centenary of António Aragão, a founder of Portuguese Experimental Poetry. For the latter, staged at the Teatro Municipal Baltazar Dias in Funchal, Faria contributed both original music and live interpretation.
2504 arrived in 2024 as his most conceptually ambitious work. Released on 25 April—the 50th anniversary of Portugal's Carnation Revolution—the piece lasts precisely 25 minutes and 4 seconds, the revolutionary date embedded in its duration. It draws on Schaeffer's musique concrète, Radigue's analogue synthesis, and Reich's phasing techniques. The source material includes archival recordings from before, during, and after the revolution—news broadcasts, speeches, religious celebrations, sports events, and advertisements. Born nine years after the revolution ended decades of dictatorship, Faria belongs to a generation that inherited democracy without knowing its absence. 2504 explores that inheritance, neither documentary nor abstraction but something that utilises the past as raw material for present-tense experience.
That same year, Faria formed NOx with Pedro Roque of CAVERNANCIA. Their debut ALTAR—a 33-minute improvisation recorded near a nitric acid factory on Lisbon's Rua do Ácido Sulfúrico—marks a return to the rawer energies of his early work while maintaining the conceptual rigour of his mature practice. The Devil's Mouth called it "beautifully twisted chaos unfolding with no respite." The duo has since performed at Desterro in Lisbon and Cooperativa Mula in Barreiro.
Thirteen years after Overlapse, Overlapse XIII (2025) invited eight artists to reimagine his debut album, with Faria as curator and mastering engineer. Contributors include Tren Go! Sound System (Pedro Pestana of 10 000 Russos) and João Vairinhos (LÖBO), among others. His inclusion in Glitch: Designing Imperfection (Mark Batty Publisher, 2009)—a foundational text on glitch aesthetics—and his work as a university lecturer position him within the field's wider discourse. He remains part of Portugal's experimental scene alongside @c, Vitor Joaquim, and Hugo Olim.
What emerges from two decades is an artist working in the spaces between—noise and melody, analogue and digital, solo practice and community. As both practitioner and theorist, university lecturer and mastering engineer, Faria occupies multiple positions within Portugal's experimental music ecosystem. In a field where technology promises frictionless production, he deliberately seeks the grain, the texture, the resistance. The work continues. The frequencies shift. Something is always happening at the margins.