Fresh from Porto, where last Friday they brought time to a halt at a standing-room-only Teatro Campo Alegre, Raül Refree and Niño de Elche release their new album, Cru+es. After five years of exploring amorous and spiritual exaltation live in a show, Ecstasis, that has toured the world, understanding music as a vehicle for supreme abstraction, the duo is now consecrated.

Starting with the title, a symbol of addition and multiplication that doesn't shy away from its Christian evocation, Cru+es is a meeting: the union or, rather, the reunion of two personalities so different and yet so compatible that, together and separately, they have given us key albums in the history of this country. Two profoundly rich backgrounds converge, expanding the limits of song from the most experimental electronics and appealing to a transcendental idea of existence.

The sources of literary inspiration don't end with Antes de y Nádas, the first two advance singles. In addition to the verses of Yannis Ristos and the innovative prose of Péter Nádas, Rilke, the monk Thomas Merton, and Ernesto Cardenal appear in the chilling Salmo XXI. And they do so amidst noise and silence, between dream-pop and the severe distortion of our Senescente Mundo, between rhythmic mathematics and ambient music.

Screams and whispers that sublimate the greatness of the minimal, the mysticism of the essential: friendship, love, life, death, resurrection... an almost religious experience that, above all, must be enjoyed. Because what Raül Refree and Niño de Elche do is —in the deepest sense of the term— a liturgy: a public ritual enveloped in the nuclear blue of Marta Pazos' art direction, which, after the previews at Conde Duque (Madrid), Sonar (Barcelona) and the aforementioned in Porto, begins its tour today in Manresa (Teatre Kursaal-Fira Mediterrània) before visiting various European stages.