"Six very varied pieces by a fine trio of Spanish-based musicians, beautifully recorded in the stone-built Eremita de la Anunciada in Urueña. A music that appears to be located halfway between chamber-improv and contemporary classical music, and which is like no other."-Another Timbre

EMAIL Interview With Ingar Zach, March 2008, by Simon Reynell:

AT: How long has the trio with Esteban Algora and Alessandra Rombolá been in existence, and how did this group come about?

ZACH: I got to know Esteban and Alessandra when I moved to Madrid in 2004. Esteban is a very special musician and he is the first choice on accordion in Spain, when it comes to contemporary music. Esteban and Alessandra have played together for a long time, in duo and in other constellations such as the trio MEI (with Horacio Curti on shakuhachi), where they exclusively play Japanese music, both traditional and contemporary. Alessandra and I play together with Rhodri Davies in MUTA . Esteban, Alessandra and I had our first and so far only performance as a trio in Madrid in March last year. We wanted to play together and investigate the combination of instruments. And after the concert we all felt that this was certainly something to take further. We decided to call Pierre Olivier Boulant from Toulouse to come to Urueňa with us, to record music in the beautiful small stone church close to Valladolid. So, basically the trio is very fresh still, but right now, we have lots of plans, and we are all three very happy with the outcome of the recording.

AT: The church has a very particular acoustic that you are clearly exploiting in the music. Could you tell us about this?

ZACH: Yes, Alessandra recorded her solo cd there in 2005, and we both fell in love with the place and the acoustics. After our first concert we decided that it would be very natural to choose a space for the recording which had a special and reverberant acoustic, and we immediately thought about the church. We wanted our sounds to melt together in the space, and work on the total group sound where the room became a fourth member of the group in a way.

AT: Could you explain the title of the disc, and of the individual tracks?

As it is an old stone church we thought it would be a nice connection to name the tracks after minerals, and the title of the cd, '...de las piedras' (which means, "...of the stones") could give the listener a sense of understanding of the space we are playing in. Alessandra also uses tiles which gives a direct association to the sound of stones. It's nice to try to find connections between the music and the titles, even if sometimes the connection can be very vague. But in this case I feel we managed to find titles that have some kind of meaning with the music.

ZACH: Much of '....de las piedras' sounds like contemporary classical music. How much of the music was at least partly composed or at least pre-planned?

I don't think of it like that. In fact I don't even try to separate or distinguish between composed and improvised. What we do in the trio is to talk about sounds we like, and also different possibilities of structure and form. And then we try to improvise with the material and/or structure we have agreed upon. In the recording I think we had 7-8 ideas in total, and we did three or four versions of all of them. Finally we ended up choosing just six, because it made sense musically and we thought the form of the cd worked well with the final six tracks.