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 thatreflects 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.”