Catalan double bass player Àlex Reviriego has an exceptional and innovative command of extended bowing techniques. He is also gifted with an endless curiosity to explore more and more timbral characteristics of his trusted instrument. This profound connection and affinity to the bull fiddle was fostered in countless, previous formations of contemporary, improvised and experimental music, including black metal and folk music. Reviriego works regularly with the local free-improv trio Phicus and the Memoria Uno ensemble, the drone project Völga and with sax player Tom Chant’s Stripped Abstract.

«Blaue Tauben», inspired by a short poem of Austrian expressionist poet Georg Trakl (Blue doves / Drink by night the glacial sweat / That springs from Elis’ crystalline brow.) is Reviriego’s debut solo double bass, featuring him playing the double bass with assorted preparations. The eight pieces of are linked as a meticulous suite that «has been considered, worked on and matured over an eighteen month gestation period». Reviriego acts-plays-sounds as a highly inventive, mad scientist who keeps the listener shocked, amused and totally off-balanced with his demanding and surprising sonic innovations – different kinds of crystalline, alien noises, torturing, industrial drones and meditative, resonant whispers. His methodical, incisive techniques sounds at times as referring other experimental scholars of the bass, but his revolutionary, idiosyncratic discourse, especially on the longest piece here, «kristallener Stirne», is truly remarkable

As his comrade in the Phicus trio, guitarist Ferran Fages, observes: «like a poem where words hide and reinvent new meanings that withdraw from conventional logic». You may acquire new perspectives about the sonic horizons of the double bass after a flight with this rare dove.

Eyal Hareuveni

Àlex Reviriego (b, prep.b)