As the founding double-bassist of cult ensemble Portico Quartet, Milo Fitzpatrick has spent two decades navigating London's post-minimalist jazz circuit. Yet in August 2022, Fitzpatrick decamped to the foothills of Spain's majestic Sierra de Guadarrama mountains. A relocation and psychic recalibration that birthed the second iteration of his chamber-jazz project, Vega Trails.
While their 2022 debut, Tremors in the Static, was a skeletal exploration alongside saxophonist Jordan Smart (Mammal Hands, Sunda Arc), Sierra Tracks is a widescreen expansion that maps the rugged terrain of central Spain onto the fragile contours of the human mind. It hovers between grandiosity and intimacy with a cartography that drifts into Bucharest's cosmos on Thursday, February 12, 2026, when Vega Trails perform live at Control Club.
For Fitzpatrick, Sierra Tracks is a way to make sense of the mental toll the pandemic years took on him, during which he became preoccupied with time and how history repeats itself in the psyche. He now treats time like psychological weather patterns that revisit the same rooms until movement, sound, and attention shift its interior design.
The album opens with "Largo," a five-minute overture that begins with a curious cello harmonic series, riffing on the panpipes played by local knife-sharpeners who travel through the neighbouring Spanish villages. Fitzpatrick takes this utilitarian process and transforms it into an epic cinematic entry point. The track evokes Jaume Morera i Galícia, slowly materializing a new canvas from gray mist into vibrant fields of color. Much like that 19th-century Spanish landscape painter’s obsession with the specific light and peaks of the Sierra de Guadarrama, Fitzpatrick uses the resonance of his strings to create vast space inside the recording’s frame.
On tracks like "Reverie" and "Dream House", the refrains fade in and out with daydream logic, becoming a mechanism for clarity and order amid emotional chaos. In fact, the entire album can be read through Arnold Schoenberg's theory of developing variation, in which a small, continually revised motif carries a new contour and weight of memory.
The inclusion of an expanded string section brings the record fully into focus. But, despite the expanded lineup, it is multi-reedist Smart who remains the vital voice in the Vega Trails project. Smart bridges jazz and folk traditions through an array of wind instruments, including soprano and tenor saxophones, bass clarinet, and the Turkish/Armenian ney flute. In the folk-melody-rooted "Els," Smart acts as humanity navigating the expanded orchestral brush. The production quality is meticulous, reflecting the influence of David Toop’s Oceans of Sound, with Fitzpatrick perceiving each track as an internally unfolding "aural story".
“Murmurations” is the most explicit use of developing variation as drama on Sierra Tracks, bringing to mind Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. Reich viewed repetition as a living organism. Fitzpatrick pursues that same spark, tucking his rhythms into the bass's resonance rather than resting them on a drum pad.
He also mirrors John Surman's folk-jazz, particularly in how the reeds interact with open-ended compositional structure. It's this openness that ultimately creates the album’s risk. There are moments where the natural splendor evoked by the strings is undeniable, yet Sierra Tracks avoids being merely "ambient". There is a constant, forward-leaning momentum that seems to happen on its own.
The record concludes with "Sleepwalk Tokyo". Referring to Fitzpatrick’s Lost In Translation-style jetlag experiences in the Far East, it evokes an otherworldly sense, serving as a reminder that, while a specific geography inspires the album, it is ultimately about the traveller's internal geography.
Sierra Tracks is an album that goes straight to the heart—an exploration of the relationship between the complexity of mental processes and the organic natural world. Each note and phrase feels like a live demonstration in developing variation as personal therapy. It is internal landscape music on a grand scale.
