La Otra Band is a Barcelona-based, experimental collective of five improvisers – vocal artist Alba Tor, guitarist and electronics player Olivier Jambois, pianist and electronics player Leonardo Cincinelli, bassist Camilo Fernández, and drummer Mariano Camarasa. They have been running the La Otra Jam every other Saturday at RAI in Barcelona since 2022.
This free improvised setting is an open, inclusive jam session that welcomes musicians, dancers, poets, and visual artists and features guest appearances from key figures in the Catalan avant-garde scene. La Otra Jam Vol. 2 is the quintet’s sophomore album, following La Otra Jam (Empty 6 Pack, 2025). It was recorded at ArcticWave Studio in Barcelona in March 2025, during the same session as the debut album, featuring the same nine musicians.
The short pieces of La Otra Jam Vol. 2 offer an anarchistic, raw, and urgent collision of different and distinct improvisation practices, with no pre-written material, but with Cincinelli’s mixing and producing (with bassist Fernández), the album features sound design, post-production editing, reshaping, and layering of the recording material. Therefore, the album captures the immediacy of the fragmented, free improvised material and adds depth and refinement through the thoughtful post-production process.
The outcome is inventive, unpredictable, and often chaotic, and quite ecstatic. Each piece suggests its own kind of twisted sonic architecture, its cryptic texture and atmosphere, and spiky dynamics, all recontextualized and assembled into imaginative, disorienting, and restless sonic landscapes. Before you begin to grasp what this colorful, playful cacophony is all about, it is over.
Eyal Hareuveni
Alba Tor (voice), Olivier Jambois (guitars, Pure Data effects programming), Leonardo Cincinelli (piano, live electronics, post-production), Camilo Fernández (electric bass, effects), Mariano Camarasa (drums), Andrew Baker (soprano saxophone), Melissa Bertossi (tenor saxophone), Miquel Jordà (harmonica), Tur (synthesizer), Daniele Lipari (junglofono), Mauro Battisti (double bass), João Vieira (drums), Alessandro Campobasso (drums), Sergei Maltsev (drums)
