Jazz
áMARXE · 6 March 2026
The quartet on “Electric Rebound” has no bass player, and that’s the first thing you notice: Ricardo Formoso plays flugelhorn, Virxilio da Silva guitar, Iago Mourinho electric piano and Miguel Cabana drums, and the low lines fall to the piano. Seven tracks, forty-four minutes on the nose, all of it written by Formoso, recorded by Rubén Montes at Disquesi Studio in A Coruña on 21, 22 and 23 February 2025 and released thirteen months later by the Galician label áMARXE. The recording keeps the air of the room inside the record: you hear where each of the four was standing, and the distance between them tells you as much as the notes do. In a quartet with no bass, that distance is the information.
The flugelhorn is the centre of everything, and Formoso handles its tone with a control you don’t hear often, in the line of Kenny Wheeler in his best years: pure sound, long phrases, silence in between. “Orion”, eight minutes twenty-three, opens the album with a melody that climbs and leaves air between the notes, and Formoso’s solo there is the record’s best argument. Da Silva, who comes out of the band Juzz, does the opposite when it’s called for: on “Overloaded” he pulls out a distorted rock sound, and on the title track he stretches into a raw solo. Mourinho holds down the bottom and still finds time to come forward, in the middle of “Electric Rebound” and in his slot on “Voltage Dreams”. Cabana’s drum introduction to the title track is what keeps the whole piece upright while the others go looking for things.
In a quartet without double bass, the harmonic foundation is always Mourinho’s left hand, and that gets charged for on the two long pieces: when he himself steps out to solo, on “Orion” and “Whispers In The Wire”, there’s nobody left to move the floor, and all seven tunes end up leaning on the same left hand. That said, “Whispers In The Wire” is the track that stays with you, seven minutes forty-six of unhurried flugelhorn and guitar, and the album never sags across its forty-four minutes. It can only be bought or heard on Bandcamp: it isn’t on iTunes or Deezer, and MusicBrainz doesn’t list it.
Rating: 7.8/10
Text by Aina Torrents