When preparing a record, collaboration often presents unexpected signals for people who decide to do something together. These can be extremely varied signals, ranging from a sign of our society’s predominantly authoritarian leaning, to the expression of alternative ways for meeting and getting in touch reassured by practice.

This album by Jorge Castro and Nico Margherit discovers two people coming together because of their friendship – a personal, affective bond, which mutates throughout this work, realizing their mutual admiration in the process.

Intuition prevails in this album soundwork, following affinity and taste, but far from a free improv album. While this is present at the beginning – and the material they recorded is huge, enough for a ten-record-box set – the result is not a faithful delivery of it, but the starting point for a true immersion on it, generating new recordings to rescue some ideas that gradually appear as islands in this sea of early intuition.

What are those islands made of? Jorge Castro’s subtle rhythm work on the elements arising from Nico Margherit’s tonal and compositional ideas. Between tracks, like under the islands, there is still drifting, because there is time, listening and sensitive experiences about the world it embraces.

The album was recorded before the pandemic, during successive meetings at La Cúpula studio, in the heart of Mercado Norte in Córdoba, Argentina. But editing and mixing were carried out during months of strictest quarantine that area went through. That may be the reason why Track No. 6, the one closing the album, is the most noisy of all, remarkably evoking the mind-blowing silence experienced then, now stepping aside and welcoming the rumor and buzz those who’ve been through a lot of silence long for.

Julio Kaegi
Musician, improviser, radio host and cultural shaker.
(Córdoba, Argentina. Noviembre / November, 2020)
Trad by Gerardo Figueroa.