Label: Obliquity Records, 2025
Personnel - Sara Serpa: voice; Matt Mitchell: piano.
Portuguese singer Sara Serpa and American pianist Matt Mitchell are inquisitive, creative artists unafraid to venture into challenging terrain. End of Something, their first duo recording, meditates on introspective themes with timbral fluidity and lyrical melodicism. The album features compositions by both artists, along with a thoughtful interpretation of Messiaen’s “Les Bergers”, the second movement from his La Nativité du Seigneur (1935).
Serpa’s “News Cycle” opens magnificently, immediately sparking curiosity as it evolves from insistent, grounding motifs into a reflective rubato passage shaped by abstracted piano reveries and simmering tension. “The Future”, first appearing on Serpa’s trio album Close Up (2018) and featuring Virginia Woolf’s somber quote (“the future is dark…”), is rendered with a delicate, Satie-like harmonic poignancy.
The album is far from celebratory, sustaining a pervasive sense of desolation across several pieces. Mitchell’s “Hyper-Pathos” crawls with melancholy and restrained gloom; “Diction” unfolds slowly and cautiously, Serpa’s voice weaving through its contemplative expanse; and Serpa’s “Carry You Like a River”, with text from a haiku by American poet Sonia Sanchez, stands out as a technically brilliant, plaintive lament. Its ebb and flow radiate mystic overtones through Mitchell’s attentive playing and Serpa’s assured, graceful delivery.
Sung in Portuguese and drawn from a poem by Sofia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Serpa’s “Ar e Vento” carries subtle folk undertones, while “Dead Spirits” assumes the form of a solemn chorale, setting a text by Belgian-born French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. The album concludes with Mitchell’s “Hypo-Bathos”, a spacious, brooding piece where incisive vocal gestures hover above sparse, lugubrious chordal variations.
The narratives unfold patiently—some imbued with vibrant color, others with a subdued austerity. The mood, more blue than bright, mirrors our uncertain times, balancing complexity with quiet resolution. Listeners must be open to its intimate, deeply contemplative world.
Favorite Tracks:
01 - News Cycle ► 04 - The Future ► 08 - Carry You Like a River