Playing tenor saxophone and effects, on her latest album rastro o vacío the Argentinian improviser Camila Nebbia blends short squalls and bluesy passages with more sustained tones and a circular breathing technique whereby the winnowing pulses of her instrument achieve eerie and spectral ends.
It is that eerie quality on ‘El color de un río desconocido’ – with its whimpering pulses and foreboding stretches of time – which adds a narrative element to what at first might sound like a series of timbral exercises or simply like a talented and daring artist blowing the dust out of her instrument. Nebbia overblows her tenor to add shrill and rippling overtones to her composition whose final moments also shudder through the odd growl.
‘Helar’ on the other hand is a rowdy but urbane blues. The close miking of her saxophone allows the listener to hear every gust of her instrument and all of her fingerings, imbuing many of the tracks with a kind of percussive underbelly which on ‘Imagen velada’ for instance might sound like a form of shamanism or Morris dancing, as though she were playing while adorned with cymbals and bells. Then on ‘Volcar’ she pares everything right back down as drier puffs like wind and leaves rustling through drain pipes and tinnier pulses again conjure an atmosphere which is creepy and furtive.
The moody ‘Un camino borroso’ sounds like it hails from a mid-century film soundtrack (think Jack Lemmon kicked out of his own dwelling place in The Apartment or any number of films noir sparsely populated by private detectives and the lovelorn) while ‘Las horas’ inhabits the same atmosphere – kind of like a rainswept interlude – but introduces Nebbia’s spoken word. This links rastro o vacío to the only prior release on Lilaila Records, a venture co-funded by Nebbia, her fellow tenor saxophonist María Grand and the pianist Marta Sánchez, with the three musicians joined by Kanoa Mendenhall and Iago Fernández for Altered Visions last December, a long side which foregrounded Grand’s lilting and moist, anxious yet steadfast and sometimes rhapsodic vocals.
Camila Nebbia is an intrepid improviser and prolific collaborator whose recent work includes trio outings with Han-earl Park and Yorgos Dimitriadis plus Leo Genovese and Alfred Vogel, but whether playing solo or working as part of an ensemble the narrative aspect to rastro o vacío makes it one of her most satisfying releases to date.
‘Tierra seca’ is a guts-out squall. On her 2023 album Una ofrenda a la ausencia she evoked the exploded canopies and smudged cerebrums of Francis Bacon and David Lynch, both through her music and her selection of a cover photograph by the multidisciplinary artist Aurèlie Raidron. At brief moments rastro o vacío – whose title roughly translates as ‘trace or void’ – might also suggest cinematic body horror, but its surrealism is more in the vein of the Alain Robbe-Grillet film Last Year at Marienbad in so far as it seems to probe questions of memory and identity, with the long album closer ‘Algo que solía conocer que ya no pueda identificar o recordar’ finally laden with both ominous and disorientating effects.
Sawing shapes and volcanic rumbles cut horizontally across her instrument, part of a spiralling soundtrack which already spumes with smoke but seems ready to re-erupt, while helicopters and drones scud across the sky in a bid to quell the fiery rampage or a zombie invasion or a monster right out of a Bong Joon Ho picture, easing into a petroleum ooze or scrabbling on all fours over the blackened earth.
