There seems to be no end to the fascinating post-jazz and experimental music going on in Norway, and Hubro are right in the thick of it, cataloguing all this for our benefit. The latest release to drop through my letterbox is the second release from trumpeter and soundscape artist Hilde Marie Holsen. Lazuli is the follow up to 2015’s mini-album Ask and finds Hilde Marie inhabiting a hinterland between music as we know it and some kind of jazz afterlife where the tropes and clichés that come with how we understand the trumpet are swept away, and a series of new vistas opens up.
From here on in things become more involved; the skittering samples and looped liquid sounds are busy and strange, and the trumpet itself has the low purr of an animal in movement, searching, sliding through shaded spots just out of sight, crooning over a desert nightscape alive with other activity. It is fun listening out for where the loops begin and end, and at times it is as if they were constructed from tape; you feel as if you can almost hear the splices. It is romantic, I know, but it is there nevertheless, as if the texture and unevenness of the loops sits at odd with the gentle progress of the trumpet.
There is a nod to jazz every now and again. The sound of the trumpet in the opening of “Lapis” has the sweetness of Chet Baker, its lilting figure wafting over the gentlest of bubbling electronica. There is a nod also to some of Mark Isham‘s work, particularly the feeling of space from his playing on David Sylvian‘s Brilliant Trees, but transferred to a slo-mo Eastern cityscape, with birds riding the thermals over ancient sepulchres, the samples giving little injections of colour. As the track progresses, so the trumpet starts to emit a raspy sound, slightly upsetting the easy nature that has been presented so far and preparing us for the sixteen-minute title track that closes the album. Here, the feeling is of constant motion. Waves break across the bows of a boat as the trumpet seems to be describing huge arcs of sound that create in themselves a kind of looped effect, the sound moving in and out in a constant rhythm. The trumpet becomes the backdrop as a lot more electronic elements are drawn into the mix. They seem to be vying for attention here, as if tired of being submerged in the background up to this moment. At some point, the trumpet has been reduced to puffs of smoke, just discernible above the steadily building scene, figures are glimpsed and the presence is felt. The build up of tension as things move and scrape out of sight finds us listening less and less for the trumpet, until it has disappeared from the scene, leaving the birds cawing and clacking over the swell of water and the ever-present drone.It is a pretty impressive feat that makes Hilde Marie’s trumpet out to be one of the most insidious and mysterious of instruments. It can seemingly do whatever she demands of it and, allied to an endless stream of electronics, she is trying to redefine what we can expect of it. A fascinating listen and one that demands a follow up.
-Mr Olivetti-
