Don Malfon, Marta Warelis, Pawel Doskocz, Vasco Trilla

The seventh edition of the Poznań Spontaneous Music Festival unfolded under the motto “Noise/ Silence”, and it was precisely between these two extremes that the story of a certain October afternoon in 2023 stretched out. On the festival’s second day, in the empty hall of Dragon Social Club, before the evening concerts began, four musicians who had never shared a stage before came together. The goal: collective improvisation, without a plan, without a map, with intuition as the only compass.

The first sounds came from the delicate, gritty textures of Paweł Doskocz’s guitar, treated as a source of vibrations, rustles, and unexpected resonances coaxed out with small objects, as if he were testing where undiscovered pockets of sound might still be hiding. Into this fabric naturally wove the prepared interventions of Marta Warelis, for whom the piano keyboard was merely a point of departure. The real action unfolded on the strings and inside the resonant body, reacting to every gesture like living matter. Don Malfon’s alto saxophone completed this shared narrative, treated like a laboratory in which metal cans inserted into the bell opened the instrument to new colors. Hovering over the whole — or rather breathing with it — was Vasco Trilla, surrounded by an expansive percussion setup that became a collection of resonating surfaces. His sticks served to polish cymbals and activate small objects on the snare, setting the shared structure into a subtle, shimmering motion.

The music of this Polish–Catalan quartet, nameless yet endowed with a distinct temperament, vibrated, rustled, and trembled. Filigree sounds floated in the air and fell like heavy autumn drops. In this brief, intense moment, they added a new, unexpected paragraph to the history of free improvisation.