ARVE HENRIKSEN - The Timeless Nowhere
Rune Grammofon: RLP3210
Arve Henriksen: trumpet; with Audun Klieve, Helge Norbakken, Ingar Zach, Jan Bang, Erik Honore, Skuli Sverrison, Hilmar Jensson
This is a 4 x LP (2 x CD) overview of Henriksen’s musical journey from around 2007 to around 2018. The pieces create a career retrospective, of sorts, but their emphasis is on the ways in which Henriksen’s unique trumpet sounds both creates, and responds to, musical settings. In this respect, the pieces feel like solo explorations of sound, with any percussion or effects adding layers to the deeply emotional beauty of his playing. The pieces are arranged in three collections, which function almost as suites, and a fourth ‘live’ set. The first, ‘Captured under Mountainside’, is both an austere reflection on the sort of landscape that Henriksen grew up with and a eulogy to his older brother, who died of cancer while this album was being put together.
There can’t be many people with a serious interest in jazz who have not come across Henriksen (either from his own work or as a member of Supersilent or in his contributions to other artists). The pieces gathered are, for me, reminiscent of the ways in which Supersilent work: the use of open structures to the music, the layering of electronic effects, the gently shifting rhythms all call to mind the group’s modus operandi. What Henriksen does here, largely as solo projects (despite the appearance of a supporting cast of some stature), is to pare the music back to its purest, most Platonic forms. Across these pieces, he experiments with trumpet sounds – playing without a mouthpiece to create his trademark where the trumpet sounds like a wooden flute, using effects to distort the pitch and tone, and singing, on ‘Paridae’ (from ‘Towards Language’), in a falsetto that is layered into a ghostly Gregorian chant. Across the pieces, there is a sense of themes being developed and explored. In the live recording of ‘Towards Language’ (from Punkt), the sense of immersion in religious music is palpable. On the other sets (‘Cryosphere’, ‘Captured under mountainsides’, ‘Acousmograph’) there is a suggestion of powerful organising principles, but these are cloaked mysteriously so that the developing sounds and musical textures have a logic that is dreamlike and opaque but also feels crystal clear – until you try to explain it.
Reviewed by Chris Baber
Rune Grammofon: RLP3210
Arve Henriksen: trumpet; with Audun Klieve, Helge Norbakken, Ingar Zach, Jan Bang, Erik Honore, Skuli Sverrison, Hilmar Jensson
This is a 4 x LP (2 x CD) overview of Henriksen’s musical journey from around 2007 to around 2018. The pieces create a career retrospective, of sorts, but their emphasis is on the ways in which Henriksen’s unique trumpet sounds both creates, and responds to, musical settings. In this respect, the pieces feel like solo explorations of sound, with any percussion or effects adding layers to the deeply emotional beauty of his playing. The pieces are arranged in three collections, which function almost as suites, and a fourth ‘live’ set. The first, ‘Captured under Mountainside’, is both an austere reflection on the sort of landscape that Henriksen grew up with and a eulogy to his older brother, who died of cancer while this album was being put together.
There can’t be many people with a serious interest in jazz who have not come across Henriksen (either from his own work or as a member of Supersilent or in his contributions to other artists). The pieces gathered are, for me, reminiscent of the ways in which Supersilent work: the use of open structures to the music, the layering of electronic effects, the gently shifting rhythms all call to mind the group’s modus operandi. What Henriksen does here, largely as solo projects (despite the appearance of a supporting cast of some stature), is to pare the music back to its purest, most Platonic forms. Across these pieces, he experiments with trumpet sounds – playing without a mouthpiece to create his trademark where the trumpet sounds like a wooden flute, using effects to distort the pitch and tone, and singing, on ‘Paridae’ (from ‘Towards Language’), in a falsetto that is layered into a ghostly Gregorian chant. Across the pieces, there is a sense of themes being developed and explored. In the live recording of ‘Towards Language’ (from Punkt), the sense of immersion in religious music is palpable. On the other sets (‘Cryosphere’, ‘Captured under mountainsides’, ‘Acousmograph’) there is a suggestion of powerful organising principles, but these are cloaked mysteriously so that the developing sounds and musical textures have a logic that is dreamlike and opaque but also feels crystal clear – until you try to explain it.
Reviewed by Chris Baber
