Up North cs880

Vasco Trilla continues to be prolific through these turbulent times, including a recent release with Swedish improvisors on Creative Sources, Up North (provisionally noted here in the review of Kalpa in February...), after electroacoustic trio Behenii II (reviewed in December — neglecting to mention his duo album with Don Malfon on Confront, Towers of Silence...) following as well trumpet trio Choreography Of Fractures (reviewed in October...) on Sluchaj. The latter was a continuation of various Polish collaborations for Trilla, including now In the no time — released on Canadian label Tour de bras, recorded November 2023 — with Pawel Doskocz (electric guitar) & Zofia Ilnicka (flutes): Trilla & Doskocz had released Hajstra in 2019, so that became the name for their project together, later adding Ilnicka. (The latter was unknown to me, but Doskocz did release Aural Accidentals on TripTicks Tapes in 2023, plus appeared on a few Spontaneous Live Series releases, including No. 9 featuring Guilherme Rodrigues.... No. 17, not including Doskocz, was then reviewed here, also in October.) So Hajstra's project, particularly adding flute, does again seem to interrogate questions of acoustic or electronic, industrial versus natural, or even the locus of the human per se. The frequently naturalistic sound (often with a lurking industrial quality, starting from opening static...), i.e. combinations of resonances & timbres, can sometimes suggest e.g. the Erb-Mayas-Hemingway trio as their calm & seemingly "outdoor" explorations have moved more into the electronic realm for Phyla music (as noted here November 2025) — but then Hemingway had already been credited with "controlled feedback" with that trio: Is that electronic? How does it compare to Trilla's means, which apparently remain acoustic? Yet there's certainly a sense of controlled feedback on In the no time, including guitar swells within or around the texture (& so in relation to mic'ing). Hajstra had opened with a sense of emergence (& static) as well, but also tended toward the more insistent, pounding industrial — i.e. versus the sometimes more mellow, cyborg jungle of In the no time, various twittering & passing hums, senses of spatial echo, various pattering.... Senses of sheering & transformation emerge as well from series of pops & buzzes, a sometimes skulking sense of space, itself sketching an expansive (but generally understated, partially empty...) sonic environment: The foreground can become busier at times.... sometimes flute is more featured, other times filling smaller spaces with quiet resonances. Titles are evocative, i.e. suggestive of different procedural or gestural orientations, sketches or aspects of the ongoing (natural-industrial, generated human-hybrid) world, different facets or times of day... accessed, the title also appears to suggest, from outside the routine everyday itself, i.e. from a space of rituals or dreams. So that's music. Todd McComb's Jazz Thoughts