Ghost Strata is the third duo album from Catalan prolific percussionist shaman Vasco Trilla and Portuguese trumpeter Luis Vicente, following A Brighter Side of Darkness (Clean Feed, 2019) and Made of Mist (577, 2021). Trilla and Vicente continued to collaborate in larger formats and on various occasions. The album was recorded at Underpool Studio in Barcelona in May 2023.
Trilla and Vicente are resourceful, ever-inventive improvisers who are always busy expanding their sonic palettes with extended breathing and percussive techniques, and with various objects, and they have already established a profound, telepathic camaraderie. Ghost Strata offers five untitled «Strata» pieces, and each piece sounds like a mysterious, irreverent yet deeply spiritual sonic ritual that has the power to summon well-meaning ghosts and exorcise the evil ones. Each «Strata» suggests its own highly immersive atmosphere, and the whole album almost deepens the transcendental, almost out-of-body listening experience.
Trilla plays orchestral percussion in the Barcelona-based trio with his soul mate, Catalan double bass player Àlex Reviriego (with whom he plays in the local Phicus and Liba Villavecchia trios, and with whom he recorded the recently released duo album Jiuweihu), and Spanish keyboard player Clara Lai (who hosted Reviriego in her Bec and corpos trios). The newly founded Helena trio recorded its debut album live during the Ocuspinatti Festival in Bilbao in December 2023. A year later, this trio, with Portuguese sax player Hugo Costa, recorded the album Yellow Belle.
Reviriego composed five mysterious, contemplative, and sparse pieces for a supposedly standard piano trio, but there is nothing conventional in this trio. These pieces, with titles referring to mythological women, distill the idiosyncratic voices of Lai, Reviriego, and Trilla into dramatic yet minimalist, sparse textures with their own, unpredictable inner logic and dynamics. Every note and gesture tells a rich, nuanced story, perfectly capturing the spirit of foggy, wintertime.
The unconventional rhythm section of Reviriego and Trilla teams with French alto sax player Christine Abdelnour for a first-time meeting and a 39-minute live set during Munich’s Music & More Impro festival at Einstein Kultur in Munich in May 2025. The untitled free improvised piece focuses on the almost infinite extended bowing, breathing, and percussive techniques of Reviriego, Abdelnour, and Trilla, who explore and investigate their own sonic palettes and the resonant parallels with the others. This trio creates an enigmatic, dramatic, almost otherworldly texture, sometimes even sounding electroacoustic. Often, you can not tell who is doing what or how, as the idiosyncratic voices of these imaginative improvisers blend into a bigger whole.
Eyal Hareuveni
Luis Vicente (trumpet), Vasco Trilla (percussion), Clara Lai (keyboard), Àlex Reviriego (double bass), Christine Avdelnour (alto saxophone)
