Parallel Realities II is Portuguese drummer-composer-bandleader João Lencastre’s follow-up album to his quintet album, Parallel Realities (FMR, 2019). Both albums were recorded in Lisbon’s Timbuktu Studio, and both feature the same line-up – Catalan tenor and soprano sax player Albert Cirera, and fellow Portuguese guitarist Pedro Branco, pianist Rodrigo Pinheiro, bassist and electronics player João Hasselberg, and Lencastre, who adds electronic percussion to his drum-set. Pinheiro and Hasselberg played on Lencastre’s No Gravity album (2020), and Cirera, Branco, and Hasselberg play in Lencastre’s latest incarnation of the Communion ensemble, Unlimited Dreams (Clean Feed, 2024).

The album offers three compositions by Lencastre and five collective improvisations. All focus on exploring dramatic and unpredictable, risk-taking sonic contrasts and collisions, alternating between the delicate and introspective to the chaotic and explosive. The Parallel Realities quintet assembled the right kind of distinct, fearless musicians for such a complex and layered musical journey in search of the uncertain and the infinite.

The 13-minute collective improvisation, «The Weight of Nothing / The Weight of Sound», best captures this album’s elusive, intricate, and dramatic essence. It begins as a cinematic, ambient piece, gravitating towards chamber, experimental, sound-oriented improvisation, and patiently evolves into an urgent, powerful, and intense piece, with Branco’s effects-laden guitar and Cirera’s sax shouts and cries setting its dramatic, distorted tone.

Eyal Hareuveni

João Lencastre (drums, electronic percussion), Albert Cirera (tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone), Rodrigo Pinheiro (piano), Pedro Branco (guitar), João Hasselberg (bass, electronics)