Nada es Nada brings together Caracas-born guitarist Juanma Trujillo, Costa Rican bassist Kenneth Jiménez, Barcelona-based percussionist and sound artist Vasco Trilla in a set of improvised works recorded at Underpool Studio in Barcelona.
Nada es Nada is the document of an ongoing creative relationship of three talented musicians that gather in Barcelona roughly once a year to perform and workshop ideas, and this recording captures the accumulated understanding of those encounters.
The result is masterful music that moves fluidly across a wide range of aesthetics, dynamics, and genres including improvisation that encompass free jazz and avant-garde approaches, as well as intricate soundscapes and noise explorations; from passages of considerable intensity and density to moments of near-silence and minimal sound exploration.
Trujillo is a guitarist of remarkable expressive range whose work spans jazz, rock, and free improvisation, on Nada es Nada, that flexibility is fully on display: at times he plays rich harmonies and melodic lines, at others he recedes into ambient texture or outright noise, always in service of the collective sound.
Jiménez is an exceptionally accomplished bassist, equally compelling in his arco playing as in his rhythmic and articulative precision, whose New York-based practice moves between composed and improvised contexts with equal fluency.
Trilla, one of the most in-demand voices in the European free improvised scene and a veteran of more than 100 recordings, brings a seemingly inexhaustible palette of timbres to the trio, specializing in transforming the drum kit through preparations and found objects to produce sounds that bear little resemblance to conventional percussion.
Both Jiménez and Trilla make use of preparations throughout the album, placing objects on their instruments to produce unusual timbres and textures. This, combined with Trujillo's facility for moving between pitched and non-pitched sound, gives Nada es Nada a tonal quality that resists easy categorization.
The three musicians are equally fluent in formal playing and extended technique, and the interplay between those two modes is part of what makes the recording coherent as a whole.
The tracklist, which includes pieces titled "Orphic Tales," "Sacred Monsters," and "La Mort et les Statues," suggests a shared interest in mythology, ritual, and the inanimate brought to life. Whether or not those themes are explicitly programmatic, the music carries a weight and deliberateness that gives it a particular gravity.
