Vasco Trilla - The Bell Slept Long In Its Tower (Thanatosis Produktion, 2024)

By Eyal Hareuveni

Catalan (of Portuguese origin) percussionist Vasco Trilla is a singular, visionary sonic scientist, a shaman of poetic sounds and, a restless searcher of lost and imagined vibrations and resonances, or as his close friend and long-time collaborator, fellow Catalan bassist Àlex Reviriego calls him, “a natural born filmmaker that, somehow, ended up playing percussion”. The prolific Trilla has collaborated and recorded with Ra Kalam Bob Moses, Mars Williams, Patrick Shiroishi, Elliott Sharp, Steve Swell, Susana Santos Silva, and Jasper Stadhouders, and released about seventy albums in the last decade as a leader or co-leader, in addition to other recordings with free and modern jazz, experimental metal and noise, fusion and Franz Zappa cover bands.

Trilla’s seventh solo album The Bell Slept Long In Its Tower (and second for the Swedish label Thanatosis Produktion) offers meditative pieces that are based on the symbolic and historical use of bells in different regions and cultures around the world, all evoke a deep sense of timeless mysticism. The album was recorded at VT headquarters in Barcelona in August 2023.

Reviriego compares Trilla’s work to the oeuvre of great Spanish film director Luis Buñuel. In his insightful liner notes he suggests that Trilla has a similar “absolute trust towards his raw materials and the most delicate sensibility to the subtleties of its own specific characteristics… His ‘ears gaze’ obsessively focused on the details of his tools, the possible combinations, the best scenario for each bell ring, for each subtle bow stroke... his sounds interact and develop in a totally unexpected (but mesmerizing) inner logic”. Reviriego thinks that Trilla is gifted with total faith and devotion in the possibilities of his sound objects, surrendering to their nature, the magic will just be revealed.

The Bell Slept Long In Its Tower is structured around ten delicate and sparse percussive scenes. Trilla uses a small cast of objects - flat tuned bells on the surfaces of timpani and snare drum - but creates highly immersive, resonant and enigmatic-ritualist drones that exhaust the ethereal overtones of the timpani and snare drum membranes, with some unexpected mechanical noises. “This is music from an artist in total control of his tools and language, with no need or urge to show or prove anything”, concludes Reviriego. The Bell Slept Long In Its Tower is a magical journey that unleashes music's deep imaginative powers.