L’Ocell is the Barcelona-based duo project of double bass player Àlex Reviriego and acoustic guitarist Fernando Carrasco (who recorded with Reviriego the «Völga» quartet, MultiKulti Project 2017). The L’Ocell duo works together since 2015. On the third album of the duo, «El Declivi», Electric guitarist Ferran Fages (who plays with Reviriego in the Phicus and Ràdium trios) joined the duo. The album was recorded at Sant Romà de Miànigues, an old church in Miànigues, a small town in the province of Girona, in June 2018 after the expanded duo performed several concerts.
The free improvised music of the trio offers haunting and mysterious, dark and quiet psych-folk drones, often punctuated by unexpected and slightly chaotic percussive sounds and amorphous, metallic noises made by insistent bowing and hammering on the acoustic and electric guitars. The intimate affinity between these creative musicians allows the music to flow naturally, enjoy the unique acoustic of the old church. The trio surrenders its reserved, suggestive and irreverent dynamics to the Baroque reconfiguration of the 12th-century church, and lets its delicate drones caress and collide, degrade and collapse at the mercy of the relentless effects of time and nature. Only the last «Els gestos del menyspreu» and «Raig verd» attempt to sketches a loose, lyrical melody, still troubled by metallic and percussive noises.
Reviriego continues this enigmatic vein on his fifth solo album «Dorothea», Àlex Reviriego has left his usual double bass and has delved into the possibilities of the acoustic guitar, enhanced by the shadows feedback effects and electronic devices. The album was inspired by the image of Dorotea of Cappadocia, who casts her own shadows. She was a brilliant philosopher who proved difficult to execute and nearly impossible to shut up. According to the legends, she was tortured for witchcraft after refusing to marry a powerful man. And then tortured for the witchcraft of returning from the tub of boiling oil unharmed.
The four pieces of «Dorothea» were recorded during the spring and summer of 2021, and the cover borrows the iconic painting of Giacomo Gestaro of Dorothea. The atmosphere on this album abstracts the enigmatic psych-folk drones of «El Declivi» and ornaments them with minimalist, repetitive themes and subtle layers of feedback noises. The short first and third pieces are melodic and almost pastoral in their own twisted ways while the second piece and the bonus fourth piece are quite unsettling with their disturbing noises.
Eyal Hareuveni
Fernando Carrasco (ac.g, obj), Àlex Reviriego (b, ac.g, feedback, electronic devices), Ferran Fages (el.g)
