** Edition of 250 ** Introspective Movement, Nonchalant Steps is the first vinyl outing by the Barcelona trio of Mark Cunningham, Pablo Volt and Andreu Serra, and it sounds exactly like its title: music that thinks and feels hard on the inside while walking with a deceptively casual gait. Issued by Feeding Tube Records in an edition of 250 copies, the album extends Cunningham’s long post–No Wave trajectory - from Mars and his New York “Blood Mysteries” solo work through Barcelona projects like Don King and Blood Quartet - into a stripped-back, low‑volume setting that foregrounds breath, timbre and space. Volt, a fixture of the city’s experimental underground, joins him on trumpet and flugelhorn, while Serra anchors and shades the music from the low end (electric bass, maybe keys and discreet electronics), creating an ensemble that feels at once chamber-like and streetwise.

Across concise pieces with titles like “Fall Into Blue,” “Cafayate,” “Arguments Medievals,” “Un esperit i dos cases,” “On a Dark Blanket,” “Zonda,” “Angles of a Room” and “Red Morning,” the trio works in short scenes rather than extended jams. Most tracks clock in around two to three minutes, yet they feel complete: small, carefully observed vignettes where a single melodic curve, a particular mute colour or a specific interval between the horns becomes the whole story. Cunningham’s trumpet carries traces of the 1970s electric Miles he’s often been compared to, but the attack is softer, the phrasing more laconic, like someone talking around what they really want to say. Volt’s flugelhorn and trumpet act as shadow and double, sometimes echoing Cunningham’s lines, sometimes answering from an oblique angle, thickening the harmony into sour‑sweet clusters or peeling off into their own, gently warped fanfares.

Serra’s role is crucial precisely because it is subtle. Rather than pushing the group into obvious grooves, he provides a slow, undulating foundation: a spare bass figure, a low drone, a hint of pulse that allows the horns to lean or float as needed. The result is music that rarely raises its voice but maintains a continuous undercurrent of tension. You can hear Cunningham’s long-standing interest in trance musics and layered delays, but here the electronics are minimal or absent; any echo is more likely to be room sound and breath than pedal trails. That restraint gives the record its particular intimacy. The playing is free, but the framing is tight; there is no wasted chatter, only a sequence of deliberately chosen steps.

The balance implied by the title - introspection versus nonchalance - plays out in the trio’s touch. On one hand, there’s a sense of unforced cool: phrases that start late and end early, cadences that shrug off resolution, silences that feel like a raised eyebrow. On the other, the harmonic choices, the way mutes are used, the tiny dynamic swells and fades all betray a deep, almost obsessive attention to detail. Tracks like “Angles of a Room” and “On a Dark Blanket” live up to their names, mapping the emotional geometry of enclosed spaces with tiny shifts in voicing and register. “Fall Into Blue” and “Red Morning” bookend the record with two different shades of melancholy: the former all dusk‑light and suspended chords, the latter tinged with a faint, uneasy brightness, as if something is about to happen just off‑screen.

As a document of the current Barcelona improvising scene, Introspective Movement, Nonchalant Steps is quietly significant. It brings together a No Wave survivor turned trumpeter‑sculptor of sound, a local brass polymath and a low‑end colourist in a format that resists both jazz cliché and heavy conceptual scaffolding. Instead, it offers a set of small, carefully paced episodes that reward repeated listening, each spin revealing another bend in the line or breath in the pause you hadn’t noticed before. In a catalogue as unruly as Feeding Tube’s, this LP stands out for its understated focus: a record of movements that barely disturb the surface, and steps that might look nonchalant from a distance but, up close, trace a very deliberate path.