There are people who are genuinely good at finding music that matters, and Lewis Robinson is one of them. Dancing Turtle founder Dominic Brown and Robinson go back a long way — both came up working at different labels in the same building, in the early days when the independent music industry still occupied physical space and you could tell a lot about someone by what they were listening to. Robinson was clearly listening to the right things.
In 2010 he founded Mais Um, a London independent built initially around contemporary Brazilian music — not the bossa nova shorthand the rest of the world tends to reach for, but the genuinely adventurous, experimental and underground sounds that were coming out of São Paulo, Recife, Belo Horizonte and beyond. The label’s early compilations redefined what British audiences understood Brazilian music to be. Gilles Peterson, Cerys Matthews and BBC Radio 3’s Max Reinhardt were among the first to pay attention, and Reinhardt’s assessment — that Robinson had changed the entire perception of what Brazilian music is in the UK — is hard to argue with.
The label’s roster has always reflected Robinson’s particular instincts: Elza Soares, Dona Onete, Lucas Santtana, Metá Metá, Bixiga 70, Rodrigo Amarante. These are artists who resist easy categorisation, whose work draws on deep cultural roots without being constrained by them.
In 2018, Robinson opened the doors wider, bringing in artists from further afield — Japan’s Minyo Crusaders, Ainu musician OKI, Beijing producer Howie Lee, Beirut-based ensemble SANAM — without losing the curatorial coherence that made the label worth following in the first place. It was a significant move, and it could easily have diluted what made Mais Um distinctive. Instead it revealed something about the underlying logic that had always been there: a commitment to music that comes from somewhere specific and carries genuine cultural weight.
Recent releases have continued in that spirit. SANAM’s Aykathani Malakon — a record made in the shadow of conflict in Palestine and Lebanon, described by Resident Advisor as hauntingly resonant dream pop, is exactly the kind of release that defines what Mais Um is for. Howie Lee’s At The Drolma Wesel-Ling Monastery, recorded at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, takes the Beijing producer somewhere entirely unexpected.
Find them at maisumdiscos.com and on Bandcamp.
