Benjamin Vergara is a Chilean, Valdivia-based trumpeter, improviser and educator, whose work focuses on free improvised music, notated contemporary music, free jazz and experimental music. He collaborated before with Fred Frith, Fred Lonberg-Holm and Andrew Drury and he is also the director of the festival of experimental music- Relincha – occurring since 2014 in his hometown, Valdivia.
Vergara’s free improvised duo with fellow Chilean, Bilbao-based cellist Matías Riquelme was recorded remotely between July 2021 and March 2022, most likely due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But Vergara and Riquelme use these constrictions for their benefit and as the distance intensifies and becomes more disruptive, their singular languages become more emotional, and they push and awaken underground water with their abrasive and sharp sounds. They describe this meeting as a risk-taking ride on a tightrope that assumes the necessary risks, but they know how to keep their very own imprecise balance that forces them not to fall into decay. «New limits are imposed from the astonishment of beautiful fractures, like negotiations full of corners and conflicts». Asimetrías offers seven challenging, unsettling and wild sonic collisions, mostly intense ones, that highlight the distinct but resonant, imaginative, subversive and quite often poetic languages of Vergara and Riquelme, extended by invented techniques.
The Impossibility of a Single Sound is a solo trumpet album by Vergara recorded on June 22, with no effects or overdubs, and described as a subterranean homage to seminal trumpeters of the caliber of Don Cherry, Bill Dixon, Miles Davis, Lester Bowie, Tomasz Stanko, Wadada Leo Smith, Jaimie Branch and Chet Baker. Its atmosphere is much more introspective compared to Asimetrías and it alternates between exploring a spectrum of extended breathing techniques, creating abstract and noisy sounds, and sketching lyrical and emotional, cyclical melodies, often in the same piece. The six pieces suggest immersive atmospheres nourished by a single trumpeter, a single trumpet and a few more sounds. The brief and beautiful tribute to Wadada Leo Smith, «endless chapter», is simply sublime.
Eyal Hareuveni
Benjamín Vergara (trumpet), Matías Riquelme (cello)
