Celebrating friendship is what the Mobofest has done for these 10 years, since 2017, when it burst to life in a first edition at Puig de Consolació, in Sant Joan. It returns this year, from July 23 to 25, to have the last dance and close a life cycle with a very round number: a decade.

After exploring the traditional repertoire from a contemporary perspective in their early works, Tarta Relena delved into tragic thought, oracles, and humanity's relationship with the uncertainty of the future to write and perform És pregunta (2024), an album produced entirely by the duo formed by Helena Ros and Marta Torrella. With the maxim 'less is more' as their banner, Tarta Relena offers a set of songs that narrate impermanence and turn their live performance into a ritual. Voices are the main instrument, and the different languages they sing in bring different "worldviews" to the album. They will present it on July 31st in the garden of Casa Llorenç Villalonga in Binissalem as part of the La Lluna en Vers festival. We spoke with one of them, Marta Torrella.

In the Balearic Islands, the Civil War is full of small great stories that would deserve a good film. One is the odyssey starring the Mahón musician Deseado Mercadal Bagur. The Alicante journalist Tomás Andújar, delegate of the Efe agency in the Archipelago, has just rescued him from oblivion in the book "Water is running out. The exile of Deseado Mercadal, edited by Dolmen. He has done it based on the testimony of Celeste, the granddaughter of the Minorcan, and on the two books she wrote years after returning to her island: I was in Kenadza: nine years of exile (1983) and The Civil War in Menorca 1936-1939: historical account of a witness (1994).

Arnau Galmés, on bass; Roger Moragues, on guitar; Joel Moragues, on drums, and Ari Santos, on vocals. They are Espurna, the band that has just won the Ciutat de Manacor de la Cançó award. An award that reinforces the work they have done over the last year and a half and the EP of three songs they have just released on Spotify. We talk to them for a while to know their immediate plans.

For more than three decades, she has been one of the leading double bassists and composers in national and international jazz. She has led her own projects, shared the stage with some of the genre's biggest names, and this Saturday she presents in Port d'Andratx (Studio Weil) Cerebro en equipo. Neurociencia para el desempeño y la motivación en Música (y otras Artes), a book that combines her artistic experience with years of research on the brain, creativity, and motivation. In this interview, she reflects on jazz, the music industry, the role of women, and the need to understand music as a communication tool.

The Balearic Islands Symphony Orchestra (OSIB) has presented its 2026-2027 subscription season with a total of 11 concerts at the Palma Auditorium, from October 8 to May 6, all at 8:00 PM, featuring prominent international performers and conductors. In a statement released this Thursday, the Government detailed that it is an artistic proposal of the highest excellence that will bring together some of the most outstanding performers and conductors on the international scene in Palma.

The Mallorca Jazz sa Pobla Festival reaches its 32nd edition, consolidated as one of the most important jazz events in the Balearic Islands. From July 28 to August 20, sa Pobla will once again become a meeting point for artists, creators, and enthusiasts with a program that combines big international names, emerging talent, training activities, and social commitment.

I remember the exact pressure I had to apply to the button on my mother's car glove compartment for it to open. Also the wide and round shape, and the soft touch of the plastic when I operated it, making a soft, muffled, almost spongy click. I liked the pleasant sensation of that button and the power it gave me. It was the era when we had the black Peugeot 206. That is to say, it was the early 2000s and I, the sole co-pilot of our vessel.

The world we inhabit and what we can do to improve it, respect and rootedness for language and culture, honesty and sensitivity when writing, composing and singing, poetry and close references like Ovidi Montllor, and collective dignity and freedom are the main axes on which the musical project of Andreu Valor (Cocentaina, 1978) lives and grows. He is one of the best-known singer-songwriters on the recent Valencian scene, even though he says his is a "minority proposal." He has released 12 albums since 2007; the latest, Els camins que elegim, which he will present in Mallorca on Friday, July 3, as part of the La Lluna en Vers festival program. He will be accompanied by his travel companions, musicians and producers of recent years, Blai A. Vañó́ and Héctor Tirado.

The new edition of Incajazz will turn the capital of Raiguer into a meeting point for jazz lovers during the four Sundays of July. The event returns with a program of great artistic quality that combines Mallorcan talent, international projection, and innovative proposals, consolidating it as one of the benchmark musical events of the summer in Mallorca. The concerts will take place every Sunday at 9:00 PM and will offer a journey through different jazz languages, from new experimental trends to dialogue with traditional music, while including some of the most outstanding names on the international scene.

It was at the beginning of the year, on January 24th, when Ferran Palau released the album Aniversari feliç. An album of ten songs with a visual part full of fog and a protagonist: the ghost. The musician explains that the fog represents the “idea of being in heaven, in the clouds,” and the ghost is a metaphor for shedding layers: clothes, skin, until only the soul or spirit remains. “I needed to give up certain clichés that were associated with me and my music,” he says. Thus, he has removed the drums, proposing a listening experience that takes the listener to a no-place, an ethereal, light space. He will present Aniversari feliç in Mallorca on June 27th, in the garden of Casa Llorenç Villalonga, as part of the La Lluna en Vers festival. We spoke with him.

El Molí Rocks is not what a tourist expects from Ibiza. The setting, in effect, is postcard-perfect: the Molí point, in the bay of Sant Antoni de Portmany, an idyllic place for the longest day of the year – the festival takes place on June 20th. But the music is not chill at all. If the hardest thing you've ever heard in your life is an Aerosmith ballad, this might take you by surprise. The audience at Molí Rocks also doesn't resemble the average clubber or tourist at all; they tend to wear black, have long hair, and wear t-shirts with names as optimistic as Sepultura, Black Sabbath, and Megadeth. The audience reacts to the music in two ways: either they headbang (shake their heads up and down to the rhythm of the music) or they pogo, a much more animated form of dancing than waltzing, common at rock or punk concerts, which consists – very briefly – of pushing each other in a group.

“Some kind of activism is being done, doing it from the territory and in our language”, says Menorcan Anna Ferrer, who in ‘Glosa a Menorca’ from her previous album Parenòstic (2024) already sang two years ago: “For an island that is a reserve / and is in danger of extinction [...] that there are fish that are already floating / in s’Albufera des Grau / its posidonia is dying / that preserves the coast / It talks to me about housing / and cries to me for the youth / that whoever doesn't have an inheritance / has it very very bad”. A contemporary glosa that cries for the local effects of global warming and the housing emergency. “It inspires me to sing about present-day Menorca, truly. And it’s no longer that green Menorca where there was almost no one. Menorca is already something else”, she confesses to ARABalears.

At Mallorca Live, in reality, the music is secondary. This sensation, which is increasingly repeated when talking about festivals, becomes a certainty in the island case if one analyzes the financial architecture that sustains the events linked to the Mallorca Live brand. Above all, a festival that in two weeks will celebrate its ninth edition, rebranded as Mallorca Live Occident. The entry of new sponsors and partners into the new promoter La Isla & Co is the latest step in a path full of countless commercial movements that are difficult to follow and, above all, to decipher: the tip of the iceberg of a network of dozens of companies that move millions of public euros to turn culture into a financial asset.

Mallorcans do not know our anthem. In our country, unless you are from Sóller or a slightly eccentric person, you do not know how to sing La Balanguera. And by knowing how to sing it, I mean the whole song, not just the chorus, and with the emotion it requires.

The music scene of the Balearic Islands has also raised its voice against the tourist overcrowding experienced in the Archipelago, and more and more groups and artists are dedicating songs to denounce the saturation and how residents have been relegated to being practically second-class citizens to the detriment of tourists. The latest to do so have been the Mallorcan artists Amulet and Xisk, who have released the track In Paradise, a new criticism of tourist overcrowding and the current model of the Balearic Islands. In the song, they ironically and poignantly review the problems that this saturation derives from and how the Archipelago has become a theme park where residents are the last. In fact, the first line of the song already makes this message clear: "I come from a land that no longer wants me. Theme park, next to Hong Kong".

The program notes of Calidoscopi, the latest creation by Estudi Zero, state that “characters are moved by absurd, violent, or profoundly human situations”. True, but it would be even more so if the conjunction were copulative instead of disjunctive. If the situations are absurd and violent, it is clear that they are undeniably very human. The caricature does not distort reality but accentuates it, so that this bold, irrational, and bizarre point makes the metaphorical drawing of the human condition arrive with more effectiveness. That the performance is composed of different small stories brings the Sans seal, in such a way that it transports us to that journey that Karl Valentin was piloting in this very room. For the occasion, several authors are listed in the roster of Calidoscopi –Esteve Soler, Juan Mayorga and Joël Pommerat–, which makes the mood of the different sketches raise the heat of each one considerably. There is no white humor. All contain a high dose of venom, in the same proportion as causticity and sarcasm, and without fear of crossing red lines.The first story, that of the man run over by a bus, about which I will say no more because it would be a spoiler, sets the tone of the performance. Black humor in its purest form. Human cruelty or lack of humanity, which in this case is the same, shines with all its splendor. That of the couple who confess to their twenty-year-old son that he was not a desired child, exponentially increases the portion of inhumanity. That of the seller of anything you can imagine is a mirror directed towards the stalls. And so on. All in all, rounded off with a musical number performed by Dominic Hull, a My way in the purest crooner style, accompanied by the rest of the cast and dressed as Fortunio Bonanova and the Glamouramas were in their glorious American years. Naturally, in such a diverse ensemble it is not easy to find the ideal point of homogeneity, but, even so, the performance treasures enough uniformity, both in the different stories and in the interpretation of the seven protagonists, who in such a marathon performance become an immense crowd of characters, always dressed very differently. Only a small caveat, the wigs are not very necessary. With the different changes of register, which are there, it is enough.

Sidonie is one of the benchmark bands of Spanish alternative pop with its own discourse that, over more than two decades of career, has evolved without losing its identity. Recently, however, the Barcelona-based group made an unexpected and significant turn: their latest album, Catalan graffiti (2025), is the first entirely in Catalan. On the eve of their concert at TribuFest in Felanitx, on Friday, May 29, their singer, Marc Ros, also talks about the life stage they are going through, their doubts, their successes, and the need to reconnect with music from a freer and more essential perspective.

One more summer, the cultural agendas of the Balearic Islands multiply their capacity between June and September with the arrival of dozens of cycles and festivals that lead to hundreds of concerts that, with so much competition, do not always achieve the expected diffusion and often end up buried by the avalanche of parallel proposals. We have asked performers, critics, and music managers to help us make a selection of essential live performances. The selection that has emerged goes through Mallorca, Menorca, and Formentera – in Ibiza, electronics monopolizes the summer musical programming – and includes proposals of all styles and for all tastes, from Celtas Cortos to La Zowi, passing through Antònia Font and the Symphony.

The challenge was very risky. The liaison between the Principal Theatre of Inca and the Orquestra de Cambra de Mallorca is yielding increasingly tasty fruits. That said, it is worth praising this latest achievement, which surely will not be the last, nor by a long shot, such as the complete staging of Mozart's Così fan tutte, with only small and not at all significant plot cuts which, on the other hand, have managed to give great fluidity to the narrative and make everything flow with maximum naturalness for a story that, like almost all farcical comedies, does not aim for any semblance or credibility. The intention lies in the background of the plot, which, in this case, is well-filled with readings. So much so that Miquel Àngel Raió, the artistic director of this success, has changed the discourse as much as possible, saving a bit of what "all" do. It was not easy to win a tug-of-war against Lorenzo da Ponte. We'll leave it at that. Raió, where he has undoubtedly been fundamental has been in the staging and everything related to the setting –appropriate, simple, and efficient–, in the very careful direction of actors and all other elements that, with the scenographic and stylistic collaboration of Adema, make everything run smoothly without hitches or delays. He even derives plot benefit from the incorporation of the three dancers.