Vasco Trilla is an extraordinaire magician, sound poet, time sculptor, rhythm painter and mad scientist. The Catalan, self-taught and in-demand drummer-percussionist is one of the most active, versatile and creative musicians of the Barcelona scene. He tours constantly all over the globe, playing music that encompasses elements of free improvisation, free jazz to progressive rock, metal and ambient music, with a growing circle of like-minded collaborators, including Luís Vicente, Susana Santos Silva, Ra Kalam Bob Moses, Patrick Shiroishi, Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Elliott Sharp. His albums were released by labels on both sides of the Atlantic, and now, his sixth solo album is released by the Swedish label Thanatosis Produktion.
Trilla plays on A Constellation Of Anomaly only with percussion instruments or devices and objects. None is or played in a familiar, conventional manner, but all, true to Trilla’s idiosyncratic aesthetics stress his highly creative and imaginative sonic vision and his restless search for pushing forward the timbral qualities of any instrument or percussive object. A few of his percussive instruments include Russian Flat bells bowed and played with vibrating objects, a timpani full of wind-up music boxes and spiced up by a transducer speaker, an old zither hit as a drum with two snare drums as resonators, Iranian round bells mixed with gamelan strips, styrofoam and triangles.
Each of the ten pieces of A Constellation Of Anomaly suggests its own resonating and polyphonic, dramatic and often cinematic story, but all offer distinct ideas on how to emancipate percussion of beat and pulsation. Trilla weaves wisely rich but unpredictable textures with intricate layers of sounds that flirt with poetic drones, meditative soundscapes, beautiful, delicate noises and hypnotic, gamelan and shamanic rituals.
Pure percussion Music. Pure magic that can re-calibrate and emancipate your body and soul.
Trilla role in the power trio Low Vertigo is completely different. The 27-minute of «Living documents» Trilla with fellow Catalan, electric guitarist Diego Caicedo (who collaborates with Trilla in the Hung Mung band and other projects of Barcelona-based composer-improviser El Pricto) and Portuguese electric bassist Gonçalo Almeida (who collaborated again with Trilla in the Dog Star quintet (Multikulti Project, 2021), playing live at the Dragon Social Club in Poznań, Poland in April 2019. This is the sophomore album of Low Verigo, following the self-titled debut album, recorded a year before in a studio in Barcelona (Multikulti Project, 2019). In this intense and powerful piece, Trilla anchors the massive walls of mean and distorted, doom metal grind of the Caicedo and Almeida with massive, tribal drumming. This trio eventually evades all kinds of vertigos in its uncompromising, deafening journey.
Eyal Hareuveni
Vasco Trilla (perc, dr), Diego Caicedo (el.g), Gonçalo Almeida (el.b)
