Swoop and Cross
Swoop and Cross is the alias of Copenhagen-based Portuguese musician Ruben do Vale, whose work merges physical instruments, VSTs, and field recordings into intimate, slow-burning compositions that drift between ambient, drone, and neoclassical.
A lifelong musician, Ruben began studying guitar and music theory at the age of nine, later expanding his palette to other instruments. He debuted as Swoop and Cross in 2015, releasing Stories of Disintegration (Time Released Sound, 2018) and Les Fauves (Piano and Coffee Records, 2022).
His new album, On the Grounds of Indecency (Perceptual Tapes), is inspired by Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go—a book that unsettled him to his core and led him to revisit, reframe, and reimagine his own past. Literature has long been central to his practice, with the works of Virginia Woolf, László Krasznahorkai, Gonçalo M. Tavares, and others serving as creative lighthouses.
Trained in medicine and neuroscience, Ruben is driven by a deep curiosity to understand himself and others—an impulse that runs through both his music and his scientific work.