Chilean, Barcelona-based cellist Matías Riquelme used the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns to create music with friends from Paris, Barcelona and Santiago. He asked his friends to send him home recordings of their experimental performances, and received contributions of them playing violin, guitar, drums, piano and saxophone, and added recordings of himself playing the acoustic guitar. In the spirit of contemporary composition and free improvisation, Riquelme took these fragmented sounds, cut, pasted and edited all and slowly sculpted these sounds into new musical collages.

«7», for seven pieces by seven musicians, a symbology that resonated with Riquelme, and informed the songs’ names, anagrams of the word collage. These layered and nuanced collages became a conceptual album that sounds organic and intimate despite the geographical distances between Riquelme and his friends and the different times these fragments were recorded, between February and September 2020. The atmosphere, as can be expected, is contemplative, dark and often quite melancholic.

These pieces juggle between Riquelme’s experimental, sound-oriented tendencies and the final shapes of these collages as engaging and mysterious ones. «Goo Coal», with violinist Sarah Claman and the saxes of Lucas Gaudin, multiplied and floating all over the piece, is the most experimental piece here. «Earl Cage», with its exotic and resonant sounds as paying respect to the sonic legacy of John Cage. «Cool Gale», with the prepared piano sounds of Tazio Caputo, and «Log Leg» offer enigmatic, cinematic textures. The last piece, «All (Collage of Collages)», is the most playful piece here, suggesting optimistic possibilities of playing, literally, live with his close friends.

Eyal Hareuveni  

Tazio Caputo (p), Sarah Claman (vio), Leonardo Garcia (quena), Lucas Gaudin (as, ts), Javier Riquelme (cajon peruano, dr), Matías Riquelme (c, g)) Sebastian Vidal (g)