After 15 years since their debut ‘You Liked Me Five Minutes Ago’, and with relentless activity, between various collaborations and the offshoot of Fire! Orchestra, the Swedish trio formed by Mats Gustafsson, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin arrives at ZDB with their recent album ‘Testament’. The band’s eighth album, not counting the five from the imposing orchestra, ‘Testament’ carries in its title a kind of subliminal manifesto of intent, as a testament – not definitive, of course – to the trio’s vitality. However contradictory that may be. Marking a return to their hard core, after albums in collaboration with people like Jim O’Rourke or Oren Ambarchi and one-off guests throughout their discography, they also discard the electronics, organs or flutes of previous adventures to nestle into a trio of baritone saxophone, bass and drums. Captured live in the studio by the late Steve Albini – RIP -, ‘Testament’ strips Fire!’s sound down to its bare essentials without this implying any kind of regression, but rather a process of cumulative debugging of all these years of practice and invention, as if reaching a new level of expressiveness where intuition, dialogue and common vision are sublimated into five beasts that reveal that the future can be simple and lived with equal intensity and devotion. Focusing all the collective energy in the same physical-mental space, ‘Testament’ engages the premises of improvisation, jazz, rock, noise and the psychedelicism inherent in this whole movement in themes that are as immediate in their impact as they are expansive in their possibilities, between Gustafsson’s primordial breath, capable of drawing out the most memorable lines and the most disconcerting roars, the security and fluidity of Berthling’s bass and Werliin’s sharp, swinging drums, in a rare case of absolute harmony. This is only possible after years of working and creating together, as if everything aligned to reach this state. BS

Ravenna Escaleira, an artist originally from Porto and currently based in Lisbon, builds her musical identity through a continuous process of experimentation and refinement. The saxophone, the piano and the electric bass are the vertices of a language that asserts itself between lyricism and dissonance, between melody and sound friction. Her music carries a sense of purging and a violent lyrical depth, born out of the confrontation between intimacy and the inexorable movement of reality that passes through the various cities she visits, in a continuous search for truth and freedom.