Serge Rogalski is a French, Paris-based guitarist, synth player, and composer whose work blends free jazz, experimental rock, noise, and free improvisation, exploring timbre, rhythm and space with a sharp sense of listening and interplay. Rogalski, with his trio, released two EP’s as part of a five-EP series, released three months apart, with his trio – American bassist Gaël Petrina and drummer Sam Ospovat.
The first EP, This Is Not a Blues, was recorded live at Studio Les Courdilles in Trémolat. It features the trio’s intense, raw, and physical friction-filled rock-based sound, experimenting with open, compact forms that resist settling in familiar narratives. The blues may be a distant element in the trio’s volatile sonic compound but does not inform its current, restless aesthetics. French alto sax player joins the trio for «La Ramiro» and opens its interplay into playful, almost swinging jazz mode.
Rogalski, who also did the cover artwork of the two EP’s, claims that he wanted to offer a Synesthesia-like experience. «The album doesn’t illustrate images, and images don’t ‘translate’ the music. It isn’t about assigning a sound to a form, nor about making a visual plane coincide with a musical event. What matters happens in a troubled zone: where listening begins to see, and where the image becomes a surface for listening. Where practices contaminate one another, rub against each other, shift».
The second EP, La Cueva de Goya (Goya’s Cave), captures Rogalski Trio in a more experimental, free-improvised form, recorded live at the same studio. Rogalski adds a prepared guitar to his electric guitar and synth; Petrina adds effects to his electric bass and double bass; and Ospovat adds the gamelan-sounding lithophones and objects to his drums. The music is arranged as a cinematic suite which is primal, often even ritualistic, with the sounds of church-like ringing bells, exploring unpredictable rhythmic resonances and timbres. The EP’s title evokes a descent into an imaginary space: part cave, part theatre, part dream, and just like the late paintings of Francisco Goya, the trio’s music attempts to inhabit a territory where the grotesque, the poetic and the mysterious coexist. This EP finds the trio in its most exploratory, poetic mode.
Eyal Hareuveni
Serge Rogalski (guitar, prepared guitar, synthesizer), Gael Petrina (bass, double bass, effects), Sam Ospovat (drums, lithophones, objects), Gaël Horellou (alto saxophone)
