Luis Vicente & Vasco Trilla - a Brighter Side of Darkness

When does a duet means that the music is thinner than with a bigger ensemble?

Well, when the duo in question isn’t the one formed by the Portuguese trumpeter Luís Vicente and the Luso-Catalan drummer Vasco Trilla, both known for their endless resources, sound wise and in terms of the grammars they use to turn the technical procedure we call improvisation to the aesthetics of improvised music. At the beginning of each piece reunited in “A Brighter Side of Darkness” it’s obvious we’re listening to a duo, but the music has an ascensional motion: it slowly builds from almost nothing to a huge, dense, complex construction, with walls, corners and furniture, growing in height, in walking space and in countenance.

Suddenly, without realising it, we testify just by listening an out-of-body experience. It’s when the music gets more physical that these two spontaneous composers leave their bodies, and the bodies of their instruments, to give us what is one of the most fulfilling works of spiritual music in present times. As such, you have here a brilliant companion for those transcendental albums you love since you discovered the devotional music of John Coltrane, even though Vicente’s and Trilla’s adhesion to “theomusical subjectivity” do not have a religious motivation. They found the Absolute, the invisible Other, in the music itself, the same way Aldous Huxley did and made this novelist write that «after silence, that which comes nearest to express the inexpressible is music». You don’t want to miss this.