The Selva is the Portuguese free-improvisation trio featuring Lisbon-based Ricardo Jacinto, new percussionist Pedro Oliveira (who replaced founding drummer Nuno Morão), and prolific, Rotterdam-based double bass player Gonçalo Almeida, all adding live electronics to their arsenal. The Selva was founded in 2016 to explore the intersections between free improvised music, electroacoustic practice, and minimalism.

Mistérios Negros is The Selva’s fifth album, recorded at OSSO studios in Portugal in February 2025. This addition of Oliveira marks the trio’s expansion of the use of electronics and electroacoustic devices, as well as a deeper experimentation and exploration of the tension between composition, improvisation, acoustic matter, and electronic transformation.

Mistérios Negros (Black Mysteries) refers to the volcanic Terceira Island in the Azores Archipelago, where, once, at one of the highest points of the active volcano, a cave titled Furna do Sulphur released very pure, and supposedly narcotic sulfur with a subterranean hiss and intense heat. Around the year 1760, the volcano ceased to smoke, marking the prelude to a greater catastrophe: a series of earthquakes.

The Selva suggests their cinematic interpretation of this igneous lore about an enigmatic land, a story that was echoed in the 1974 film The Land That Time Forgot, or in Werner Herzog’s 2016 film Into the Volcano. The tension-filled music harnesses the hypnotic images of lava flowing into rich electroacoustic textures that anticipate the inevitable catastrophe, with dramatic, tectonic sonic shifts and violent and noisy eruptions, as well as The Selva’s familiar strategies of minimalist repetition. The Selva calls this highly immersive music «a series of beguiling wordless anthems for a speculative thought-lost Atlantis».

Eyal Hareuveni

Ricardo Jacinto (cello, electronics), Gonçalo Almeida (double bass, electronics), Pedro Oliveira (percussion, electronics)