“Here, everybody plays with everybody,” remarks improvisor, bassist and electroacoustic experimenter Àlex Reviriego. While ego-free attitudes aren’t unusual among DIY improvisors, the Barcelona scene fosters unique overlaps between free improvisation and experimental composition woven through with threads of heavy music.

Regular event series include Pristine Folds and Nocturna Discordia, the latter organised by Discordian Records, which has been running weekly events for more than ten years. At the time of writing Nocturna Discordia has presented close to 400 concerts, creating a socially and sonically porous space for musicians to move between fixed projects and ad hoc improvisation sessions.

Phicus
“Fe2+/Fe3+”
From Redox
(Hera Corp) 2023

Phicus, the trio of Ferran Fages (guitar), Reviriego (double bass) and Vasco Trilla (drums) move from intensely detailed explorations of timbre to bursts of free jazz inflected freakouts. REDOX was released earlier this year on Reviriego’s Hera Corp cassette label. It emerged from troubled studio sessions, and that tension is palpable in the album. It’s perhaps their doomiest set, venturing into slow, monolithic grooves while retaining the fluid, improvisatory energy and textural innovation that impels their music.

Diego Caicedo
“Primer Principio: Ex Nihilo”
From Seis Amorfismos
(Burning Ambulance) 2023

Diego Caicedo is a guitarist and composer born in Colombia and now based in Barcelona. For the music on Seis Amorfismos, his angular riffs and guttural vocals are backed by a string quartet, including Reviriego on double bass alongside Sarah Claman and Francesc Lompart on violins, and João Braz on cello. All the parts are meticulously composed and scored, with the potential ornateness of the strings drastically subverted. The result is ferociously singular music with elements of everything from orchestrally scaled dissonance and extreme metal through to no wave.

El Pricto/Don Malfon/Vasco Trilla
“Elpheia”
From Behenii – Part I
(Discordian) 2024

El Pricto is the founder of Discordian Records and the weekly Nocturna Discordia event series at Soda Acústic in Barcelona (many recordings from which are available at Discordian Records' Bandcamp). Here, El Pricto downs the saxophone/clarinet he usually plays, replacing it with modular synth as part of a trio with Don Malfon (trumpet) and Trilla (drums). Inspired by the Behenian fixed stars, “a selection of fifteen stars considered useful for magical applications in the medieval astrology of Europe and the Arab world”, the record is a unique terrain where the three instruments enter into a chittering space evoking alien dialects.

Clara Lai
“Llena”
From Creciente
(UnderPool) 2022

Based outside Barcelona, pianist Clara Lai is nevertheless tied into the city’s scene. In the duo slight deform she plays with Ferran Fages, while her 2023 album Corpos features Reviriego on bass alongside drummer Oriol Roca. On 2022’s Creciente, she leads a quartet of Albert Cirera (tenor sax) Iván González (trumpet) and Joan Moll (drums). It’s a record equal parts joyous and abstract. The tracks, compositions by Lai which afforded the other three space to add their own interventions, move from intricate timbral explorations into bounding, labyrinthine melodies.

Amidea Clotet
“Mete El Pan En La Lavadora”
From Trasluz
(Relative Pitch) 2022

Trasluz originates from Clotet researching the sound and textural possibilities of her instrument, the electric guitar. It’s a beguiling listen, one which does that rare thing of pulling new sounds from a guitar, and, even rarer, seemingly doing so without the use of effects pedals. Using a variety of unnamed objects, she variously makes the instrument sound like a violently agitated cello and a lump of metal rolling around a silo, but mostly the textures she creates have no easy referent. It’s often harsh, but the drama she pulls from radically non-idiomatic approaches is also transfixing.

Vasco Trilla
“Awake Nature From Her Dream”
From The Bell Slept Long In Its Tower
(Thanatosis) 2024

Vasco Trilla’s latest album is inspired by the historic and symbolic use of bells in different cultures and regions from around the globe. Trilla uses resonant flat tuned bells, timpani and bowed cymbals to summon a shimmering, pulsating mass. It’s a meditative record which never falls into new age cliché, instead using chiming, reverberant sources to create a slow-moving terrain that oscillates between eerie and ominous, gloaming and sinister. Like many of the musicians here, Trilla is a frequent collaborator in improvisatory ensembles alongside his rich solo practice.

Tom Chant
“Soprano (Part III)”
From Solo
(Hera Corp) 2023

Born in Ireland, Tom Chant is now based in Barcelona. Alongside artist and curator Mayssa Fattouh he organises the Pristine Folds event series, often at l’Automaticca, a print shop which also serves as an event space. Solo marked the first release on Reviriego’s Hera Corp. label. While Chant focuses on saxophones here, like Clotet he pulls radically unconventional sounds from his instruments. Creepy gusts of wind, harsh metallic blasts, the album displays a patient, meticulous evading of the expectations embedded in the saxophone.

Inhumakind
“Light-Proof”
From Self-Deification
(I, Voidhanger) 2022

Inhumankind is the duo of Reviriego and flute player Pablo Selnik, who has also recently released solo on Hera Corp. The project began with the pair attempting to play Darkthrone songs with double bass and flute, and then evolved into them playing their own compositions. On their second album, they flesh out the acoustic sound with vocalists and piano. Their music remains a truly confounding space. Unearthing the intricacy and elaborate melodicism typically left buried beneath blast beats and distortion.

Read Daryl Worthington's full report on this scene of improvising musicians in Barcelona in The Wire 487. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the digital magazine library.