Margarida Garcia

Portugese bassist Margarida Garcia remains one of the most distinctive improvising voices on her instrument even as she moves well beyond contemporary improv praxis with an umbilical that runs deep into the contemporary psychedelic underground. This new LP, released in an edition of only 200 copies on guitarist Manuel Mota’s Headlights imprint, sees her exploring some darkly dramatic arco drone space with enough F/X to sink the Titanic. The territory is murky, sub-aqueous, giving the nod to her recent collaboration with Marcia Bassett (Zaimph et al) while moving into the kind of occult headspace previously occupied by Tokyo zonesters like Toho Sara, Keiji Haino’s Nijiumu et al. There’s a magisterial arc to the sonics that means it has as much to do with Conrad Schnitzler’s mile-high cello work on the first Tangerine Dream album as it does with William Parker and the way she bridges huge gulfs of silence with distant tectonic fragments and single weighted notes will have you lining this up next to Yasushi Ozawa’s Some Fragments Of Bass Performance for maximum drone dislocation. Recommended. (Volcanic Tongue)