Scolari is a new Portuguese trio featuring the prolific trumpeter Luís Vicente with electronics player Bruno Pereira (aka Aires, founder of Colectivo Casa Amarela) and electronics and synth player António Silva (aka Sal Grosso, founder of the label Combustão Lenta) that was founded during the Covid-19 pandemic and had a handful of performances. «Mata Mata» is the debut, full-length album of the trio, following a split tape via Faux Amis (with the Dutch duo Lärmschutz, 2021), and parents four pieces picked out of three hours of free improvised music recorded at Soundinnovation Studios, located in the picturesque Atlantic coast of Portugal, in August 2020.
Scolari recommends listening to its music through a closed metal door in a damp concrete garage smelling of cars and cigarettes and drenched in reverb, drones by malfunctioning ventilation systems, car motor subs and exhaust fumes, all soaked by the best beer a few cents can buy. This recommendation makes perfect sense. Pereira and Silva produce layers of ambient noises and abstract, left-field electronics textures while Vicente colors these pieces with sparse, lyrical outbursts, gently hovering over the noisy waves.
The tension between the raw, uncompromising electronic sounds of Pereira and Silva and the introspective, emotional playing of Vicente, and the intriguing ways that the three musicians attempt to resolve it and find a peaceful common ground is the very essence of Scolari. In the third piece «D’Além», the extended breathing techniques of Vicente suggest that deserted to the camp of Pereira and Silva, but later on he insists on coloring the dark, gothic electronic noises with bright trumpet sounds. The last, extended «Jungle Puzzle» captures best – literally – the spirit of Scolari, as the trio experiments and explores its arresting aesthetics in an imagined atmosphere of a stifling, abandoned mall populated by unstable sonic compounds, with only a few cheap beers assisting the trio to keep afloat the noisy drones.
Eyal Hareuveni
António M. Silva (synth), Luís Vicente (tp), Vitor B. Pereira (elec)
