HILDE MARIE HOLSEN - Lazuli

Three years separate Hilde Marie Holsen's debut solo LP from the new "Lazuli", but the stylistic evolution they bridge is immediately striking. The pieces on "Ask" (2015) were, to all intents and purposes, first cries - the timid improvisations of a trumpet regressed to an elementary, almost pre-musical stage. An expressive coming into the world from which arose, in a sense, a hermeticism born of unawareness of reality.

Her second outing on Hubro starts again from that same darkness, but frames it from a far more familiar and unsettling perspective. Digital manipulations act on tormented, anguished brass lines - an effect heightened by the circular breathing technique - sketching the fragile contours of an end-of-the-world scenario, nameless and apparently with no way back ("Orpiment").

The hushed phrasing of "Lapis" again looks to ECM's post-jazz lineage, and especially to fellow Norwegian Arve Henriksen, but in the background a subtle, persistent drone coating gathers elusive synth punctuation. Clearly, the long, ashen descent underground of "Lazuli" is its inevitable continuation, as well as the dramatic peak and focal point of the expansive soundscape that gives the album its title.

Swells of mounting volume warp and distort Holsen's breath, an overbearing shadow of itself that at times seems to suffocate the entire sonic space, before finally dying out into a crawl of glitches and other digital debris - perhaps themselves the prelude to a future advance toward a more pronounced electronic contamination.

The spontaneous intersection and symbiosis between this dimension and the trumpet's acoustic matrix establishes a kinship with the recent visions of Anne Guthrie, who has likewise moved away from quiet sonic grafts within the natural domain to venture into the murky tunnels of the subconscious. Both artists have certainly charted new expressive shores, from which they can push on even more boldly into the uncharted territories of an unmistakably contemporary musical thought - one of which Hilde Marie Holsen now makes herself a worthy spokesperson.

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27/08/2018