Gaspar Serey - Cavernícola

 Released: April 4 

With his second EP of the year, Chilean improvisational musician Gaspar Serey brings us four free-form pieces of free jazz-adjacent compositions which really takes the limits of a single electric guitar and pushes them as hard as possible. There’s a ton of interesting textures throughout that pop up seemingly sporadically and are quickly replaced by new ones as notes come in flurries and waves. The album opens up with what is one of the most ambient adjacent pieces, “Uno.” There’s a persistent background of sound beyond the sometimes frenetic notes of the guitar that feels like pads, though they appear to be created simply as a byproduct of the guitar and the effects being applied. It feels like a rather foggy piece, even as the bright plucks pop through. 

The next track, “Dos,”  is quick moving piece that that sees the guitar in a bit more of a raw light, hitting all sorts of strange chord inversions and formulation in rapid succession. This track feels like one of the more psychedelic ones and the guitar has a certain quality about it that often feels like it’s just swirling around your head at seemingly unpredictable and changing speed. A rather ear-tickling bit of sonic fun. “Tres” takes things into deeper darker territory with a deep low end chugging through as the same kind of speedy playing that also sees some rather creating muting to form some oddly percussive textures.

Coming to the end of the album, we get “Cuatro,” the most firmly ambient piece on here with the guitar FX creating these very long drawn out and reversed sounding note holds. They pile on to one another and end abruptly, creating a kind of stilted feeling. It’s interesting to think that this was all done more or less as live recording, especially considering the textural richness in this track, as well as the previous entires. Cavernícola is at its core a purely exploratory album, finding new ways to squeeze new sounds out of the instrument while also keeping a firmly jazz-based approach to composing.