Mushin (無心) is a Zen Buddhist concept that translates to «no mind» or «empty mind». It refers to a state of consciousness free from fear, anger, or ego, where action arises naturally and without obstruction. In musical terms, this becomes a space where sound is not forced or premeditated, but emerges with clarity and immediacy. This is a perfect description of the debut duo album of Portuguese, Stockholm-based trumpeter Susana Santos Silva and Catalan, Barcelona-based in-demand percussion wizard Vasco Trilla, who have collaborated before in two albums of the Fish Wool trio (with Brazilian sax player Yedo Gibson) and in the ad-hoc trio with Irish, Barcelona-based sax player Yom Chant (The Paradox of Hedonism, Discoradian, 2015). Silva and Trilla’s album was recorded at La Isla Estudio in Barcelona in September 2024.
Mushin captures Silva and Trilla embodying the Zen mystical philosophy through a spiritual, deep listening, and responsive interplay. The two extended pieces «Mu» and «Shin» unfold organically like sacred, mysterious rituals and are introspective, highly nuanced conversations in sound, moving between tension-building and release, and silence. Mushin is a highly immersive sonic journey that reflects the sensibility of being totally possessed by unpredictable but most expressive sounds, and the deep commitment to the art of the moment. It is a masterful demonstration by two idiosyncratic improvisers and sonic poets or shamans, whose «no mind» is infinitely rich with magical, transformative sounds.
General Ludd is the mythical, legendary figurehead of the 19th-century Luddite movement. Frustrated English textile workers used the name as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and claimed to be operating under his command while smashing automated machinery. General Ludd is also the name of the Barcelona-based duo of Venezuela-born, modular synth player El Pricto (aka Andrés Rojas, the head of Discordian label, and also as sax player, pianist, and producer) and Trilla. Neo-Luddism is the third album of the duo, recorded at The Golden Apple in Barcelona in March 2026.
Neo-Luddism’s nine pieces question technological progress when it is used to inflict dependency, automation, surveillance, extraction, and obedience, and it is a sonic, political, aesthetic, and symbolic confrontation with the contemporary cult of technology, a refusal of the machine when it becomes ideology, destiny, or religion. In this subversive and disruptive album, El Pricto’s modular synth embodied the machine as unstable organism: electrical, recursive, excessive, capable of generating systems that seem to exceed human control, while Trilla’s drums and percussion answered with physical force, friction, impact, and embodied resistance. Their dynamics symbolized a struggle between circuitry and muscle, voltage and skin, system and rupture. Neo-Luddism is both an intense, raw, noisy, nervous, and powerful sonic assault and a conceptual act: an album about breaking the spell of technology, restoring a heated conflict to the idea of progress, and reclaiming humanity inside the noise of the system.
This album comes with a 15-point manifesto, by El Pricto and Trilla insist that they are not against technology but refuse technology when it is imposed as destiny: «platforms one cannot leave, systems one cannot understand, devices one cannot repair, algorithms one cannot contest, labor processes one cannot slow down, infrastructures one cannot democratically govern». It suggests the most human, thought-provoking yet poetic interplay of the unpredictable, capricious but inventive machine, and the like-minded, imaginative and provocative drums and percussion.
Nada es Nada (Nothing is Nothing) is the debut album by the free-improvising trio of Venezuela-born, Barcelona-based guitarist Juanma Trujillo, Costa Rican, New York-based bassist Kenneth Jiménez, and Trilla, recorded at Underpool Studio in Barcelona. The three musicians gather in Barcelona roughly once a year to perform and workshop ideas, and Nada es Nada captures the accumulated understanding of those encounters.
The seven pieces offer exploratory, emphatic, and storytelling-like, melodic conversations that move seamlessly across a wide range of moods and timbres, exploring the resourceful, different languages of these gifted improvisers, but resist easy categorization. Both Jiménez and Trilla expand their sonic palettes with inventive usage of bows and preparations, placing objects on their instruments to produce unusual timbres and textures, and together with Trujillo’s facility for moving between pitched and non-pitched sound, cement the free spirit of this album.
Eyal Hareuveni
Susana Santos Silva (trumpet), Vasco Trilla (percussion, drums), El Pricto (modular synthesizer), Juanma Trujillo (electric guitar), Kenneth Jiménez (double bass)
