Ritual Habitual - Pagan Chant (October 2021 Clean Feed Records)

Portuguese bassist Gonçalo Almeida made Rotterdam as the basis of a busy activity with musicians from different geographic origins and his trio with Riccardo Marogna and Philipp Ernsting is one of the most prolific. The name Ritual Habitual (alliterations included, we can translate it as Usual Ritual) says it all about the purposes at play: to create ritualistic music with the repetition of motives as a method, rooted in the free jazz tradition and updated with electronic manipulations. “Pagan Chant” is presented as a tribute to the masters John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry and Charlie Haden, even if it doesn’t sound as any of them. 

In other words, the band imagine a new kind of pagan, tribal, music with the freedom aesthetics of the “black power” period of jazz history and the 21st century colors of electro-acoustic music, in a kind of retro-futuristic approach which reminds that the present is only a construction, the result of the confluence of what comes from the past and what is beginning to happen.

1. The Womb 15:43

2. Rite of Passage 09:41

3. Psilocybe Cubensis 03:50

4. Pagan Chant 05:05

5. Dionysus Carnival 07:11

6. The Eulogy 07:17

Riccardo Marogna tenor saxophone, bass clarinet & synthesizers

Gonçalo Almeida double bass

Philipp Ernsting drums

All music by Ritual Habitual

Recorded by Edwin Willemen at Sante Boutique Studio, Rotterdam | Mixed by Ritual Habitual at iii Sound Studio, The Hague | Mastered by Giovanni di Domenico, Brussels

Produced by Ritual Habitual | Executive production by Pedro Costa for Trem Azul | Design by Travassos

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Luís Vicente Trio - Chanting In The Name Of (June 2021 clean feed records)

A Portuguese trumpeter more and more present in the international scene, in such a way that he has more concerts scheduled in other countries than on his own, Luís Vicente never seems to stop: after the success of his partnership with John Dikeman, William Parker and Hamid Drake in “Goes Without Saying, But It’s Got to Be Said”, he turns to national silver (represented here by Gonçalo Almeida and Pedro Melo Alves, both protagonists of their own projects) and signs an album that inspires Drake, the above mentioned master drummer, to write (in the liner notes) that Vicente’s work is a lesson about «keep looking, searching for new possibilities, broadening ones views» and part of «the underlying code of the whole universe», as Sufi mystic Hazrat Iayat Khan put it. Once again applying his never apologetic «sense of freedom», Vicente is back with a powerful album that is a joy to listen to. He may not take any prisoners, but just because he releases them.

1. Anahata 10:33

2. Keep Looking 10:13

3. Chanting in the Name Of 11:54

4. Connecting the Dots 06:00

5. May's Flavour 07:07

Luís Vicente trumpet

Gonçalo Almeida doublebass

Pedro Melo Alves drums and percussion

Recorded on the 9th and 10th of January, 2021 at Soundinnovation Studios, by Fábio Miranda | Mixed by Pedro Melo Alves | Mastered by Marcelo dos Reis

Produced by Luís Vicente | Executive production by Pedro Costa for Trem Azul | Design by Travassos

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Albatre - The Fall of the Damned (CLEAN FEED RECORDS 2018)

Albatre are back for some more «display of urgent bass and sax noise, frantic but meticulous drumming and abrupt moodshifts», but this self-description doesn’t say it all. Something changed in this Rotterdambased band formed by two Portuguese, Gonçalo Almeida and Hugo Costa, and a German, Philipp Ernsting, since the release of “A Descent Into Maesltrom”. They’re still crossing post-Ornette Coleman free jazz with metal and punk, but now the music is more essential and minimalist, with everything reduced to the bone. And yet, the doom factor is enhanced as never before. The riffs are slowly (sometimes very, very slowly) repeated until you get hypnotized, a bit like Otomo Yoshihide’s band Ground Zero used to do, and when something different happens – colorful harmonic cloud formations and harsh noise fusing in strange ways – it’s like discovering a new planet. There’s aspects of jazzrock and of psychedelic and progressive rock going on, but what’s really important is the final impact on your stomach: the music strikes you there directly. With “The Fall of the Damned”, the jazzcore format goes to new territories.

Hugo Costa  alto sax & effects

Gonçalo Almeida  bass, keyboards & electronics

Philipp Ernsting  drums & electronics

Recorded and mixed by Albatre at Soundport, Rotterdam | Master by Bernardo Fesch at Gizmeister Studios, Lisbon

Produced by Albatre | Executive production Travassos for Trem Azul | Design by Travassos | Paintings by Rubens

The Selva - The Selva (CLEAN FEED RECORDS 2017)

The Portuguese trio The Selva likes to make musical references, to symbolize and to propose dubious significations. The debut album of the group starts with a piece full of indeterminate allusions to the Far-Eastern traditional music expressions. It goes on with a virtual journey through Renaissance times and its aesthetic values, seeming to invite us to care more for the beauty of life. Only in the third track we find recognizable ground as improvised music, but the motives and the obsessive repetitions are clearly African. From then on we hear either wales or machines operating, and when we less expect it is also a distillation of the blues form, but involved in a dreamy fog, as if reminding us from where this kind of music comes from. We’ll soon understand it as the introduction of what comes next: jazz in its more naked and crude essence. But we’re not yet at the destination of this semiotic use of sound – there’s also an acoustic / performative approach to concrete music, twice presented and twice changing into something else. This enterprise combining two string instruments, the cello of Ricardo Jacinto and the double bass of Gonçalo Almeida, with the percussion devices of Nuno Morão never rests in the chamber domain and that is an absolute novelty. This is different from everything already done with this instrumental format, but so naturally that makes you think why it didn’t happen before.

1. The Selva, Pt 1 1:37

2. The Selva, Pt 2 2:42

3. The Selva, Pt 3 15:08

4. The Selva, Pt 4 1:58

5. The Selva, Pt 5 2:00

6. The Selva, Pt 6 4:57

7. The Selva, Pt 7 11:08

8. The Selva, Pt 8 3:17

9. The Selva, Pt 9 4:32

Ricardo Jacinto  cello

Gonçalo Almeida  double bass

Nuno Morão  drums

All music by The Selva

Recorded and mastered by Nuno Morão at Scratch Built Studios, Lisbon / October 2016 / February 2017 | Mixed by Nuno Fernandes, London / January 2017.

Produced by The Selva | Executive production by Pedro Costa for Trem Azul | Cover image by Madalena Matoso | Design by Travassos

Gonçalo Almeida / Rodrigo Amado / Marco Franco - The Attic (NO BUSINESS RECORDS 2017)

All compositions by Almeida / Amado / Franco

Recorded live by Luís Candeias at SMUP, Parede, December 22nd, 2015

Mixed by Gonçalo Almeida

Mastered by Marcelo dos Reis

Produced by Gonçalo Almeida and Rodrigo Amado

Executive production by Danas Mikailionis

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ROJI - The Hundred Headed Women (2016) CLEAN FEED RECORDS

A project-oriented bassist, Gonçalo Almeida debuts with “The Hundred Headed Women” one more amongst the several he is involved with, simply presented as Roji, the Japanese word for “dewy ground”. Being a duo with a drummer (Jörg A. Schneider), we start the listening with the idea that a rhythmic and textural approach to improvisation waits us, not very far from the one developed together by John Edwards and Mark Sanders. That mistakes vanishes very rapidly, and not only because there’s just one “song” without a guest playing a melodic instrument, either trumpeter Susana Santos Silva and baritone saxophonist Colin Webster. It happens that Almeida’s electric bass is wildly processed, functioning many times as a noise generator or, thanks to all the electronics used, as an orchestral conductor. 

And as if it wasn’t enough, the coordinates of the proposed music come from metal, with the attitude picked from punk To simplify, we can say that this recording sounds almost like an encounter between Bill Laswell and Mick Harris (Napalm Death), but simultaneously more trashy and more jazzy, more Public Image Limited and more Sunn 00))). We can compare Roji with the Italian band Zu, but there’s a fundamental difference: this isn’t fun. It’s amazing, in a very dark, frightening way. The movie “Antichrist” by Lars von Triers found a better soundtrack.

1. Inner Roji (de Roji & Susana Santos Silva) 6:53

2. 2 Sisters (de Roji) 2:18

3. Sounding Restraint (de Roji & Colin Webster) 6:30

4. 1 1=3 (de Roji & Susana Santos Silva) 2:47

5. Pacific (de Roji & Colin Webster) 4:18

6. Prelude to a Broken Sax (de Roji & Colin Webster) 6:38

7. The Hundred Headed Women (de Roji & Susana Santos Silva) 9:13

Gonçalo Almeida  bass and loops | Jörg A. Schneider  drums

Guests:

Susana Santos Silva  trumpet (Tracks #1,#4,#7)

Colin Webster  baritone sax (Tracks #3,#5,#6)