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Vasco Trilla continues to be prolific through these turbulent times, including a recent release with Swedish improvisors on Creative Sources, Up North (provisionally noted here in the review of Kalpa in February...), after electroacoustic trio Behenii II (reviewed in December — neglecting to mention his duo album with Don Malfon on Confront, Towers of Silence...) following as well trumpet trio Choreography Of Fractures (reviewed in October...) on Sluchaj. The latter was a continuation of various Polish collaborations for Trilla, including now In the no time — released on Canadian label Tour de bras, recorded November 2023 — with Pawel Doskocz (electric guitar) & Zofia Ilnicka (flutes): Trilla & Doskocz had released Hajstra in 2019, so that became the name for their project together, later adding Ilnicka. (The latter was unknown to me, but Doskocz did release Aural Accidentals on TripTicks Tapes in 2023, plus appeared on a few Spontaneous Live Series releases, including No. 9 featuring Guilherme Rodrigues.... No. 17, not including Doskocz, was then reviewed here, also in October.) So Hajstra's project, particularly adding flute, does again seem to interrogate questions of acoustic or electronic, industrial versus natural, or even the locus of the human per se. The frequently naturalistic sound (often with a lurking industrial quality, starting from opening static...), i.e. combinations of resonances & timbres, can sometimes suggest e.g. the Erb-Mayas-Hemingway trio as their calm & seemingly "outdoor" explorations have moved more into the electronic realm for Phyla music (as noted here November 2025) — but then Hemingway had already been credited with "controlled feedback" with that trio: Is that electronic? How does it compare to Trilla's means, which apparently remain acoustic? Yet there's certainly a sense of controlled feedback on In the no time, including guitar swells within or around the texture (& so in relation to mic'ing). Hajstra had opened with a sense of emergence (& static) as well, but also tended toward the more insistent, pounding industrial — i.e. versus the sometimes more mellow, cyborg jungle of In the no time, various twittering & passing hums, senses of spatial echo, various pattering.... Senses of sheering & transformation emerge as well from series of pops & buzzes, a sometimes skulking sense of space, itself sketching an expansive (but generally understated, partially empty...) sonic environment: The foreground can become busier at times.... sometimes flute is more featured, other times filling smaller spaces with quiet resonances. Titles are evocative, i.e. suggestive of different procedural or gestural orientations, sketches or aspects of the ongoing (natural-industrial, generated human-hybrid) world, different facets or times of day... accessed, the title also appears to suggest, from outside the routine everyday itself, i.e. from a space of rituals or dreams. So that's music. Todd McComb's Jazz Thoughts
There are percussionists who keep time, percussionists who colour it, and then there is Vasco Trilla, who seems increasingly interested in finding out whether time actually needs to be there in the first place.
On "Up North", the Barcelona-based Portuguese-born percussionist travels to Stockholm for a set of encounters with three particularly sympathetic troublemakers: Martin Küchen on saxophone, Vilhelm Bromander on double bass and Alex Zethson on cembalo. The result is four extended pieces that treat percussion less as a rhythmic department than as an unstable laboratory of surfaces, resonances, friction and physical gestures. The first three were recorded in studio in March 2024; the closing piece documents Trilla's solo concert at the former St Paulskyrkan, now Mötesplats Mariatorget.
Trilla has been extraordinarily prolific, with more than a hundred recordings across free improvisation, jazz-rock, progressive music, metal and ambient territories, while his eight solo albums have increasingly concentrated on the possibilities of percussion itself. That background matters because "Up North" doesn't sound like the work of somebody trying to demonstrate how many objects can be hit in sixty minutes. It sounds like somebody who has spent a considerable portion of his life asking what happens after the obvious sound has already been found. The answer is often fascinating.
“Phantom Surge”, the opening ten minutes, begins with Vilhelm Bromander's double bass establishing a low-frequency presence around which Trilla's percussion gradually materialises. The music seems to be listening to itself before deciding what it wants to become. Resonance is more important than pulse; the drum isn't necessarily telling us "when" something happens, but "where" it happens in the acoustic field. This is one of Trilla's particular strengths. A piece can contain an enormous amount of activity without becoming conventionally busy. Wood, skin, metal and unidentified objects appear and disappear inside the texture. Some sounds seem struck, others rubbed, scraped or allowed to vibrate. The distinction between percussion and sound design becomes pleasantly unreliable.
“A Topographical Vessel” brings Zethson's cembalo and Küchen's sopranino saxophone into the picture, and suddenly the album acquires another kind of tension. The harpsichord, with its historically respectable reputation for powdered wigs and people who insist that Bach is a personality test, becomes an oddly effective partner for Trilla's more unruly percussion.
Küchen's sopranino doesn't provide a stable melodic centre either. Its sounds can be piercing, breathy, almost vocal, then suddenly become another layer of acoustic debris. The three musicians don't appear to be constructing a theme and decorating it. They are constantly negotiating the physical properties of the sounds themselves. And this is where "Up North" becomes more than a collection of improvised sessions.
The title might suggest geography, but the album isn't particularly interested in giving us Sweden as a postcard. There are no cinematic Nordic sunsets here, mercifully. Instead, “north” feels like a condition: colder, more spacious, more oblique. Sound seems to arrive through a thinner atmosphere, with silence functioning not as a gap but as another participant.
The nearly nineteen-minute “A Dissolving Landscape” is the album's great centre of gravity. Bromander's bass and Trilla's percussion create an elastic environment in which small gestures accumulate until the whole thing begins to feel almost industrial. There is a remarkable sense of pressure without a conventional climax. The music stretches, thickens, contracts, changes temperature. Then, gradually, Küchen and Trilla are left almost alone.
Their exchange is one of the record's finest passages. The sopranino's cries and the percussion's fractured responses begin as recognisably separate voices before moving toward something much stranger: a composite instrument whose constituent parts are still audible but no longer entirely distinguishable. A recent online discussion of the album similarly notices the way Trilla's acoustic approach can produce an almost industrial or hybrid sonic environment, with resonance and timbre doing much of the compositional work.
The title "A Dissolving Landscape" is consequently apt without being overly programmatic. The landscape isn't disappearing because the musicians are trying to imitate environmental sounds. It dissolves because categories become increasingly difficult to maintain. Bass becomes texture. Percussion becomes atmosphere. Saxophone becomes abrasion. Rhythm becomes pressure.
Then comes the extraordinary “Mötesplats Mariatorget”, almost nineteen minutes of solo Trilla recorded live in the former church. This is where the album's previous three pieces suddenly make more sense.
Without collaborators, Trilla has to construct the entire acoustic ecosystem himself. The church gives him enormous spatial possibilities, but he doesn't simply exploit its reverberation for grandeur. He works with it. Sounds are allowed to bloom, decay and collide at different distances, creating an almost three-dimensional composition.
There is something almost architectural about the performance, but it never feels like architecture imposed upon sound. Rather, the building seems to become part of the instrument.
That is particularly revealing when considered alongside Trilla's broader practice. His solo work has consistently expanded the definition of percussion, incorporating objects and unconventional sound sources rather than treating the drum kit as a fixed technological endpoint. Here, the room itself becomes another object.
And yet "Up North" never lapses into the academic stiffness that sometimes accompanies this kind of vocabulary. There is curiosity everywhere. The musicians sound as if they are genuinely interested in what might happen next, which is a surprisingly radical quality in improvisation. Too many supposedly spontaneous performances sound as though spontaneity has been carefully rehearsed and approved by a committee. These musicians leave the door open.
The production helps. The first three pieces were recorded by Gustav Lindelöw at Studio Spegeln, while the live finale was captured by Johan HÄllgren at Mötesplats Mariatorget; the album was mixed by HÄllgren and mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. The sonic presentation preserves enough detail for tiny gestures to remain consequential without flattening the larger dynamic contrasts.
There is also an intriguing contrast between Trilla's restless activity and the album's overall patience. Nothing is hurried. Even when the surface becomes dense, the music doesn't behave as though it has somewhere else to be. That patience is perhaps the real meaning of "Up North". Not stillness, exactly. Attention.
The musicians wait for sounds to reveal their consequences. A stroke on an object is not simply an event; it has a tail, a resonance, a spatial footprint. A bass tone alters the acoustic conditions in which the next percussion gesture will be heard. A saxophone phrase changes the apparent density of everything around it. The music is therefore cumulative without being repetitive. It resembles watching four people construct a temporary machine without ever agreeing beforehand what the machine is supposed to do. And perhaps that is why the record feels so convincing. There is no obvious attempt to make improvisation sound profound. It simply trusts the intelligence of listening.
Trilla has accumulated an impressive international network of collaborators and recordings, but "Up North" doesn't feel like a résumé entry. It feels like a conversation with musicians who understand that the most interesting thing they can contribute is not necessarily another statement, but a useful disturbance in somebody else's.
The album begins with a phantom surge and ends in a meeting place. Between those two points, landscapes form and dissolve, instruments lose their borders, and percussion quietly escapes the prison of rhythm. The north, in the end, isn't a destination. It's what happens when the map stops telling you where to go. Vito Camarretta (Chain D.L.K.) |