Vasco Trilla — The Bell Slept Long In Its Tower

Vasco Trilla is by all accounts an experimental percussionist, although I'm unsure how to label his work after hearing his latest The Bell Slept Long In Its Tower. The album takes ten in tracks and forty minutes of mostly continuous, droning tones.

These rough-hewn, seemingly acoustically sourced drones with metallic resonances that it's difficult to imagine emerging from any conventional instrument, sounding more like one was able to get an unusually melodic result from scraping together two pieces of scrap metal.  The later tracks introduce quasi-melodic performances from strangely tuned mallet instruments that sound vaguely gamelan-esque.

As there are no familiar sounds or instruments for the mind to latch onto, the mood here is otherworldly and strange.  Trilla clearly has a vast library of strange devices.  In terms of pacing and apparent intent, it is something of an esoteric ritual ambient recording.  I might compare this to Z'EV's The Sapphire Nature or Organum's 80's output, which similarly used metallic textures to create drone, and did so without heavy electronic processing.

Initially, I thought Trilla could be utilizing some kind of electronic process to loop and sustain his percussion tones, but at this point, it seems to me that perhaps he has subtle techniques of continuously drawing these tones out of his instruments, and everything that is heard seems unprocessed.  On the track "Aural Eclipse", Trilla is conjuring stormy gusts with rolls on large gongs and cymbals, but with an intentionally soft touch, so that the actual impacts are obscured.  On pieces like "Glas" and "Airless", he can be heard sustaining singing bowl tones for many minutes.  At times, the tones wrench, bend and groan in a way that I become again unsure of what instrument they could be from.

The Bell Slept Long In Its Tower is a masterfully creative work of darkly glimmering ritual percussion ambient.  It bridges the gap between a traditionally academic style and the intuitive subconscious nether realms of industrial and dark ambient.  The pacing may be too patient and deliberate for some, as there are a great many moments where a note is struck and dissipates completely into silence before another occurs.  For anyone already accustomed to this, it is a potent mystical experience. To find out more