Refree is sprawling, polyhedral. Whether as producer, composer (Niño de Elche, Rosálía, Lee Ranaldo, Sílvia Pérez Cruz) or musician, he persists in materializing the sound universe that bubbles up in his head. As he puts it: "I just try to make the music I imagine". To illustrate this desire, as if he wanted to get rid of the producer for a moment, his latest album, El espacio entre, features a collection of experimental, minimalist songs, where sound is chewed up to exhaustion.

To enter in El espacio entre it is interesting to know where such an experience comes from. The album was born from two previous soundtracks: the first, in 2022, with Nuria Andorra, for the classic La aldea malditaby Florián Rey (a Spanish silent film made in 1930 ), and the second, for the film Un año, una noche by Isaki Lacuesta.
In fact, the whole membrane that envelops the fourteen songs of Refree's album, from beginning to end, exudes this dreamy atmosphere, this state of enchantment that remains under the eyelids when leaving a movie theater in a state of shock. There is, at the source of the album, a bit of that typical material of the most suggestive soundtracks where piano notes suspended in the void evoke the perfect prelude to the crime.

Refree doesn't seek to describe, nor to expand narratively. Quite the contrary. The Barcelona-born musician is more interested in transience, hollowness and fragrance, to become more expressive, richer and more vigorous.
We could say that Refree is more convinced by perfume than by flowers, more by kisses and traces of carmine than by lips. In this work, it's all about curling up in landscapes of mist and mud, humidity and shadow, to find in a fragment of song the sting of searing emotion.

In addition to its complexity, vibrancy and promiscuity, this album is rich in textures, layers and fabrics. And yet there's no sense of arbitrariness or whimsy anywhere. Everything hangs together, as if the sound matter were bound to the same coherence as the forests, always harmonious in their multiplicity.
For example, the album opens with "Lamentos de un rescate", a deconstruction inspired by Monteverdi's madrigals, a polyphony of voices, strings and distortion controlled with the precision of an artificier...

... concluding with the fourteenth piece "Una nueva religión" and its expansive development, as if Refree were searching for a new horizon. From lament to hope, the cycle comes to an end.

There are, however, other laments throughout this sonic journey. The fourth song, "Lamentos de un día cualquiera", and the tenth, "Lamentos de otro día cualquiera", insist on the decomposition and playfulness of the famous Italian composer's madrigals. It's not until the third song, "Montañas vacías", that forest stone, metallic percussion and dry, sharp reverberation burst into the scene.

And so, traversing all the glades of this humid nature, we move from exquisite minimalism to unifying experimentation, from pagan mysticism to a very urban everyday life; as urban as Refree's goatee and hairstyle.

After listening to El espacio entre you get the feeling that there is beauty in any corner of the world.

Txema Seglers