Trio improvisations recorded at the Eremita de la Anunciada, Urueña, Spain, August 2007. Esteban Algora (accordion), Alessandra Rombolá (flute and tiles installation) and Ingar Zach (percussion) - three Madrid-based improvisers creating music where the room became a fourth member of the group. An entirely acoustic affair. The title, taken from a poem by Pablo Neruda, suggests the use of the space where the recording was made - an old stone church where the instruments amplify and extend the potential of the location, indissolubly tying the music to the place of its recording.
Algora - the first choice on accordion in Spain when it comes to contemporary music - brings Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening Band sensibilities to bear. He embraces a remarkable range, from fluid, watery treble to thunderous sounds from the bowels of the instrument. Rombolá - who also plays in the trio MUTA with Zach and Rhodri Davies - switches between flute and an installation of hanging tiles that lend a pebbly, granite quality. She bows the tiles to produce halos of harmonics, creating what Philip Clark describes as sounds "stratified like stone or rock formations." Zach - Norwegian percussionist known for his work with Looper and Huntsville - uses bass drum to roll sonic boulders across the soundscape, morphing fragmentary gestures into erratic pulses.
Six pieces named after minerals - ámbar, Alabastro, Galena, Turmalina, Jade, Amatista - explore the alchemy of transforming stones into music. The opening ámbar sets a mood of extreme melancholy with the disconsolate accordion impregnating the cold sacred stones with sorrowful tears, set against concrete percussive sounds which add harshness and suffering while the flute emits flurries of dancing sounds. In Galena, the trio sets in motion and then cuts across a set of drones, constructing an architecture of brilliant lights and dazzling reflections which finally undergo slow collapse into cacophonous clusters of dark, roaring sounds.
As Philip Clark wrote in The Wire: "If there is a connection with composed music, Xenakis's stochastic principles and the 'anarchic harmony' that gave birth to Cage's late number pieces both come to mind. But the intensity of instrumental nuance, especially as the music begins to occupy ruder and more complex gestures, is the trademark obsession of the improviser." The trio works by talking about sounds they like and different possibilities of structure and form, then improvising with the material and structure they have agreed upon.
Alfio Castorina concludes: "A great and unusual disc, full of ideas and sounds of extreme beauty played by musicians with uncommon touch and sensibility." The reverberant church acoustics are absolutely integral - sounds melt together in sacred space, reflecting off cold stone walls. Music that inhabits the liminal space between composition and spontaneity, where every breath, every squeak, every scrape is perfectly executed and delicate by nature. Chamber-improv meets contemporary classical in one of the most striking acoustic recordings of recent years.
