The Squid's Ear Magazine


Escaleira, Ravenna: Vagabondage (Relative Pitch)

Portuguese saxophonist Ravenna Escaleira's rugged and deeply personal solo album layers saxophone, electric bass, and piano into four urgent, uncompromising pieces shaped by her wandering relationship with Lisbon, blending raw noise, deep lyricism, and powerful emotional intensity as she transforms personal history and urban experience into vivid, layered sound.
 

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product information:

Personnel:



Ravenna Escaleira-saxophone, electric bass, piano


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UPC: 5904224874100

Label: Relative Pitch
Catalog ID: RPRSS043
Squidco Product Code: 36209

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2025
Country: USA
Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold
Recorded by Marcos Pires, Jari Marjamaki and Ravenna Escaleira.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"Vagabondage comes from my idle wandering through the city and my inner relationship with it - where the unexpected takes me - I take it - desire driven. Assuming the discourse between the ruins of my memory and my present idleness, I seek to let the events influence my choices in a way they unfold from this relation between my personal history and reflected in my music through my interaction with the city.

This album was recorded in three different places of Lisbon: SMUP, Desterro and Casa do Comum by complete generosity and faith of people around me. My relationship with each instrument is being built from this, and it was born some moment in my past history, so I work in the transience of events and the transformation they greet us."- Ravenna Escaleira



"Ravenna Escaleira is a Portuguese, Lisbon-based sax player who has developed her musical language while playing in the streets of her hometown, Porto, and in various cities in Brazil, Spain, and Italy, "an experience lived on the skin". Her musical language is a process of self-discovery, and extends from music to poetry and the visual arts. She has used the pseudonym RVN to explore electronics and raw noise to suggest almost ambient textures, and has played in violinist-conductor Ernesto Rodrigues' Variable Geometry Orchestra.

The aptly titled Vagabondage is Escaleira's first solo album released by a label, after eight solo albums released on her Bandcamp page. It was recorded in three different places in Lisbon: SMUP (Sociedade Musical União Paredense), Desterro neighborhood, and the cultural center Casa do Comum. Escaleira also plays the electric bass and piano.

Escaleira describes the album as coming from her "idle wandering through the city and my inner relationship with it - where the unexpected takes me - I take it - desire driven. Assuming the discourse between the ruins of my memory and my present idleness, I seek to let the events influence my choices in a way they unfold from this relation between my personal history and reflected in my music through my interaction with the city".

The four pieces of Vagabondage, especially the opening, 25 minutes of "Girl Crazy", where she plays on the sax and the heavily distorted, electric bass, capture the urgent, rough, and uncompromising essence of Escaleira's merciless sound. It is expressed with deep lyricism that is close to the most aching ballad, and designed by the acoustic space it inhabits. The following "Fortress" focuses on building walls of distorted, noisy walls made of deep-toned bass sounds. The short, solo sax "Naked" reveals the seminal influence of Peter Brötzmann on her approach and sound. The last solo piano piece, "Fallen Angels", is a lyrical, angry ballad, but expressed with similar, urgent, and powerful emotional intensity."-Eyal Hareuveni, Salt Peanuts


Artist Biographies

"Artist from Porto, now based in Lisbon, after time spent in Brazil, Spain and Italy, in a process of self discovery that reflects itself in her music, Ravenna Escaleira will have her debut at OUT.FEST with a body of work encompassing music, poetry and visual arts. After her idiosyncratic and direct experiments with electronics under the RVN alias, which left a legacy of performances and digital releases that would go from raw noise to almost ambient textures, she has been developing her own language on the saxophone, playing in the streets. A lived experience that is reenacted through a deep lyricism, close to the most aching ballad, designed by the acoustic space it inhabits."

-Out.Fests Portugal (https://outfest.pt/eng/ravenna-escaleira/)
7/15/2025

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. Girl Crazy 24:38

2. Fortress 11:35

3. Naked 6:32

4. Fallen Angels 9:28

Related Categories of Interest:


Improvised Music
Free Improvisation
European Improvisation, Composition and Experimental Forms
Solo Artist Recordings
Recordings by or featuring Reed & Wind Players
Stringed Instruments
Piano & Keyboards
New in Improvised Music
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