Vasco Trilla "Unmoved Mover" (Fundacja Sluchaj. 2021)

There is people who made the history of improvised music and who is well exposed in the temple of criticism or in the pantheon of the mind of music lovers, then there are musicians who gave their entire life to find out new paths in articulating a personal language, and then again there are creative guys who want only to risk and give new lymph to a ‘tradition’, that of the avant-garde, and that therefore are taken by many people as redundant, while in fact they’re essential as the other cats.

Read what Andrea Centazzo said about Vasco Trilla, the musician we want to explore in this post: “Being one of the first solo percussion improvisers in the ‘70s, I paid special attention to Vasco work. This fresh music is a blossoming of ideas and sounds. Vasco is a minimalist in percussion, each sound is accurately chosen and explored to an extreme end. A world of larger horizons and open skies where the percussion trigger the most inner intense feeling in the listener”.

Born in Barcellona, Vasco Trilla started playing drums at the age of 19. Initially into progressive rock and metal, he developed an interest for improvised music, but this is really cutting short and I want to give you more cues on Trilla’s work. After all, knowing about one artist life and tastes can help in enjoying better his own art. So, the first thing I want you to be aware is that Trilla studied art history and was passionate about Polish and Russian cinema and music.

So he studied at university the movies of Wojciech Jerzy Haas, Andrzej Waida, Andrzej Munch, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, and Krzysztof Kieslowski while he listened to the music of Lutoslawski and Penderecki. On the other hand he was into the experimental metal scene of that country, with bands like Decapitated and Kriegsmachine. It is quite common for the younger generation of experimental musicians to be able to skim through such different sources of inspiration, and it’s good because you can develop your own voice made of fragments of different previous identities without belonging to anyone of those.

Between the many collaborations of Trilla you can find the names of Andrea Centazzo, Jamaladeen Tacuma, Cecil Taylor, Peter Evans, Marshall Allen, Lotte Anker, Wilbert de Joode, Mette Rasmussen, Ilia Belorukov, Axel Dorner, and this is only a small part. His last solo album is titled “Unmoved Mover” and it is issued by the label Fundacja Sluchaj. The seven minutes title track opens with small cymbals and noise interruptions here and there, but the intent of the music is to create into the listener a space where he can be aware of everything that happens as an event, as you can listen through some of the old and recent AEOC records.

Gongs and drumsticks rubbed against the cymbals give substance to the atmosphere with bold but delicate statements. Then a huge amount of small bells appear, giving the music some solemnity and the sacred tone it deserves. An openly percussive texture so to give the listener the feeling of a path through sound is experimented in Hylomorphism. Ousia is dominated by a more preeminent cymbals sound, and natural echo effects, while Living Bodies is constructed on a dialogue between thicker and denser sounds, before an explosion of little bells.

Nous – how many of you care about gnosticism or Philip K. Dick novels? – is more dominated by dynamics of sound and silence, leaving you with this presence of a vast unexplored space in your mind, where different volumes and densities of textures are also present building a fascinating climax, and if Hylozoism can seem only a subtle pause made of other bells chiming, Celestial Spheres is like listening to thunders and the natural elements in a primeval brew, interspersed with the sound of the bells.

We can get this way to the end of Causeless Cause, almost seven minutes of summary of Trilla’s art as a scultpor of sound through bells, a set of chimes activated in different moments, as if each one of them is giving life to the following. And while this album is becoming one of my favourite releases of the year, discovering my gentle side and knowing something more about myself, I can only recommend you to give Vasco Trilla the chance to become one of your favourite young players. 

 

Centazzo - Schiaffini - Armaroli "Trigonos" (Dodicilune, 2018)

Andrea Centazzo, composer and performer, is one of the pivotal figures in the so-called NY Downtown Music Scene of the 1970's. Unluckily he is known here in Italy only as 'Giorgio Gaslini drummer' – he played drums and percussions with Gaslini from 1972 to 1976 – and this fact limited his career at a point that Centazzo chose to move to the Us at the end of the decade. There, he played with John Zorn, Tom Cora, Eugene Chadbourne and Toshinori Kondo.

He also founded his own label, Ictus, and recorded with Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Pierre Favre, Alvin Curran among the others. At the same time he studied composition. A more complex figure than the 'percussionist' described by the press, Andrea Centazzo has now recorded for the label Dodicilune a new album of his own compositions, with the help of vibraphonist Sergio Armaroli and trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini. If you want to know more about this couple of musicians, read here.

The music provided by this album is 10 compositions, four by Centazzo and Armaroli, two by Centazzo/Schiaffini, and the remaining played by the trio. Being at the border of contemporary music and improvised music, all the compositions have a meditative quality that goes beyond the sum of its parts.

The gestures have a quality typical of the Eastern folk music, but they are not rooted in it: it is more an assonance than a derivation. Listening to the record, I often asked myself how good would it be to listen to this music live in a good theatre, since it's aura would be better exploited in this context.

And in effect, the issue of the record was premièred in Milan, Italy, at the Out Off, a small theatre devoted to theatrical experimentation since the 1970's. Really a good place to start this new adventure for an artist like Centazzo, who in the past has gone well beyond music also thanks to his painted graphic scores.