01. Lamentos de un rescate (03:40)
02. La plage (02:04)
03. Montañas vacías (02:31)
04. Lamentos de un día cualquiera (00:38)
05. La radio en la cocina (04:28)
06. Todo el mundo quiere irse ya (05:00)
07. Casc i pluja (01:26)
08. Amanece sin que nadie lo vea (03:50)
09. Montañas vacías II (01:32)
10. Lamentos de otro día cualquiera (00:41)
11. Las migraciones nocturnas (02:58)
12. Lo que esconden (04:12)
13. No es tan fácil aquí (06:04)
14. Una nueva religión (03:46)

Acclaimed producer (Rosalia, Lina_Raul Refree) and in-demand collaborator (Lee Ranaldo, Richard Youngs) Raul Refree returns with his second solo album for tak:til/glitterbeat.

A kaleidoscopic but seamless mashup of soundtrack music, post classical meditations, Iberian traditional elements and experimental strategies.

Deeply immersive.

Raül Refree’s second solo album for Tak:til/Glitterbeat seems to lead a liminal existence. It belongs as much to the realms of post-classical meditations and soundtracks as to ancient Iberian traditions and experimental music. The title, Spanish for The Space Between, alludes to its spatial, temporal and conceptual inbetweenness. It is a kaleidoscopic music that oozes through crevices between here and there.

El espacio entre is the work of a musical auteur, who has made a name on the international music circuit as an acclaimed songwriter-producer-musician, co-creating highly innovative albums with Rosalía, Lina_Raul Refree, Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), Richard Youngs and Rodrigo Cuevas (and many more). “There’s a lot of stuff on here that reflects everything I’ve done so far but also where I’m at the moment.” The concept for the album emerged from his soundtrack for the restored early Spanish cinema masterpiece The Cursed Village (Florián Rey, 1930). “The film is about leaving your place to go look for a better life and the emptiness that grows from it. I decided the record’s gonna be about different kinds of emptiness. Like leaving your hometown, standing in front of an audience feeling completely alone or doing lame things that really leave you empty. It explores loss, the void that separates who we were and who we are.”

Refree adheres to total creative freedom. “Many songs started from scratch. I’d just play around on the piano until something clicked, and then I gave these improvisations a more concrete shape.” Some pieces like Lamentos De Un Rescate and La Plage have a different backstory. They represent his first attempt at re-composition. Refree took Monteverdi’s madrigal Lamento della ninfa and personally directed the performance. “The soprano singer interpreted it in its original form but I recomposed my recording. I manipulated it, playing with space, distorting it, adding textures, using FXs like reverb, delay and pitch-shifting to create the sense of an ever-evolving vocal line. The same melody processed in various ways can evoke different emotions. You can almost get a whole symphony from a single voice.”

El espacio entre is a unified whole without centrepieces. “The compositions differ in length and structure but I feel they are organically connected. I’ve always been interested in creating a trip.” Each piece functions like a specific image or disposition translated into sound. The short evocative song titles provide interesting interpretative angles. They capture the introspective nature of Refree’s musical expression, which is not preoccupied with epic arrangements or grand musical ideas. It is much closer to sonic poetry. “Use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation […] compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome,” wrote the leader of the the Imagist movement Ezra Pound in 1913. Refree’s approach to improvisation, composition and production resonates with the tenets of imagist poetry. “I’m not worried about length. I feel the freedom to play very “small” songs, which are empty and spacious. I love silence. I’m happy playing less. I love what I’m not playing. That’s why I pay attention to details. But I play everything the way I feel it. The piano sequence in Las Migraciones Nocturnas is unedited. It’s not played on a click.”

His compositions unfold like a succession of transient images, each different to the one before. The short and sweet Lamentos De Un Día Cualquiera, a modern reimagining of baroque vocals accompanied by a processed viola da gamba and lute, beautifully captures his philosophy. “I like to use Joan Miró as an example. In later years, he’d just sit in front of a canvas for the whole day until he knew exactly how to proceed. He then stood up and added a tiny fraction to the whole. That’s what I’m trying to do. Use as few elements as needed to make it sound as good as possible.” Certain elements simply must be included, though, like the evanescent trumpet line in La Plage. “It has to be what it has to be.”

Recomposed madrigals coexist with hectic piano explorations (Montañas Vacías, Montañas Vacías II). La Radio En La Cocina, a pensive dialogue between lute, radio static, piano and marimba, gradually mutates into a post-rock crescendo. The immersive piece for prepared piano Todo El Mundo Quiere Irse Ya suddenly transitions into the The Durutti Column-inspired guitar sketch Casc I Pluja. It is the way he approaches rhythm, timbre, dynamics and texture that imbues his music with a sense of intimacy. His guitar meditations (Amanece Sin Que Nadie Lo Vea, Lo Que Esconden) bring to mind the music of Raphael Rogiński. In Las Migraciones Nocturnas, a Jon Brion-style soundtrack piece that disintegrates into agitated strings wailing, one can hear the echoes of his music for films. A similarly cinematic atmosphere is conjured in the composition No Es Tan Fácil Aquí. Yet the most surprising moment on the record arises in the epilogue Una Nueva Religión in which a mellow organ motif unexpectedly intertwines with Darkthrone-inspired metal blast beats.

El espacio entre is a sonic diary that may lead you to transformational events while riding the bus, train or plane, being in transit between one destination or another, the current and next version of you. “I think the only meaningful approach to music-making is to be personal. To show who you are through music. Experimentation isn’t about what’s supposed to be experimental. It’s about exploring yourself.”

1. Que te vayas (1’29”)
2. Dar a Luz (3’09”)
3. Ramírez 11012017 (1’44”)
4. La otra mitad (1’52”)
5. LG0 24022017 (1’11”)
6. Telecaster 01032017b (3’38”)
7. Niño perdío (1’23”)
8. Barbacoa (1’20”)
9. Tiranía (1’25”)
10. Ramírez 19022017b (1’40”)
11. Ramírez 19022017a (2’57”)
12. Fandangos Negros (4’59”)
13. Cuando salga el sol (3’40”)
14. LG0 28022017 (3’56″)
15. Mariscar (2’45”)

Raül Refree is one of the most acclaimed Spanish producers of the last decade. Working with ground breaking artists such as Silvia Pérez Cruz and Rosalía he has been at the forefront of the so-called “new flamenco” movement. He also collaborates with rock experimentalists like Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth – both playing in his band and co-producing Lee’s last album “Electric Trim.”

But Raül’s musical life doesn’t stop there. He is also a noted songwriter/composer/musician who has released 6 previous solo albums, acclaimed film soundtracks and an overflowing discography of
genre-skewing projects.

It is this merging of soundworlds that makes Raül’s new solo release La Otra Mitad (The Other Half) – under the moniker Refree – such an immersive and transportive listen.

Mesmerizing acoustic and electric guitar explorations meet sampled street recordings,
haunted voices and hushed electronics. Nuanced and boundless.

The latest from Glitterbeat’s label imprint: tak:til.

**********

The Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida said, more or less, that “an artist should always try to do what he still does not know how to do.” Without actually knowing this quotation but only the sensation and the wakefulness behind it, Refree’s musical art seems to subscribe word for word to Chillida’s edict.

Having spent the last years as an inspired facilitator for, and co-creator with, a plethora of storied musicians (American songwriter Josh Rouse, the aforementioned Cruz, Ranaldo, Rosalía and many more), in 2017 Refree undertook the production of two instrumental leaning 10-inch solo EPs. The first of these, Jai Alai vol.01, is mostly a collection of reflective solo guitar music, with each title named according to the instrument used on the track and the date on which it was played (“Ramirez 11012017” / “Telecaster 01032017b”). The second Jai Alai volume is quite a different proposition, with the material coming from a soundtrack project, and the sound palette expanded to include recordings of street music, voices and a subtle electronic dimension.

The tak:til release La Otra Mitad is a full-length album that weaves together the two Eps and creates a dramatic new entity in itself. Whereas the guitar tracks included from Jai Alai vol.01 echo the spontaneity and sturdy simplicity of Derek Bailey or Durutti Column, they are balanced beautifully by the more textured soundtrack compositions from Jai Alai vol.02, that make up the majority of the album. One senses the search and discovery in all of this, especially when listening to how these tracks merge together. It feels boundless. The only self-imposed limit being no discernible limits. A skillful artist figuring out how to do, what he doesn’t know how to do. Refree gives us a glimpse into the album’s genesis:

“I started the first 10″ collection because I didn’t feel like waiting for an album to be recorded and I was feeling more attached to showing what I was doing, and how I was feeling about music, right then. More like a work in progress. I also thought it was more related to the way music works nowadays. But after Jai Alai vol.2 I thought these two releases had a strong relation between them, in the way one is the evolution of the other. I wanted to do instrumental music, but at the same time I wanted vocal recordings to be the inspiration of some compositions. There’s no singer but there is one. There’s no more than just me on every song but at times there’s something like a whole orchestra.”

It is revealing that much of La Otra Mitad is music made for a movie. Or maybe, it could be called music from a movie (not all songs appear in the film). Or, perhaps also, music made during the construction of a movie. The film in question is “Entre dos aguas” by Isaki Lacuesta, a drama which explores the world of flamenco and uses non-professional actors. The director Lacuesta explains the soundtrack’s unconventional creative process:

“It was very good that Raül came to the filming in San Fernando, because he worked in the field just like us. Sometimes he was there during the filming of a scene and kept a recording of the voice of one of the characters, which then became a piece of music. Other times we would set up a barbecue with the team where he was invited and the next day, he would come back with a track called precisely that, Barbacoa. And on other occasions we showed him something in the editing room and worked the sound part right there, like Neil Young when he played music for Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Dead Man,’ which is a reference that I always had in mind during this process.”

Refree himself says that the referent that haunted him most was not Neil Young, but Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, the magnum opus of Gavin Bryars. In that piece, a cassette recording of a melody intoned by a homeless man is looped and repeated ceaselessly until a rare and at the same time ultra-emotive spiral climax is reached. The soundtrack pieces are an exercise in voices found and then converted into samples: that of flamenco singer Rocío Márquez, that of El Bolita, a boy who participated in the film and who spontaneously started singing in front of Raül, or the discarded vocal sketches from El Niño de Elche’s celebrated “Antología del Cante Flamenco Heterodoxo” which was co-composed and produced by Refree.

“I was very interested in the idea of making music with voices that were not recorded on purpose for this record,” says Raül. “They had to be recorded in other contexts, with another objective. This decision made me much more open to unforeseen things happening. And, in the end, this spirit fit with a line of work that I had been exploring for some time: to see what other areas can be reached with flamenco, something based on a certain idea of the South’s environment.”

Throughout the process of making La Otra Mitad, Raül Refree also found another voice: his own; always changing, always expanding in richness and always open to saying, what he does not yet know.