Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Arve Henriksen, Best Of…


Arve Henriksen, The Best Of ... compiled with covers and notes by Trace Reddell



The versatile and prolific Norwegian trumpet-player, Arve Henriksen, is given the greatest hits treatment in this double-LP collection. A founding member of the mysterious free jazz and space music group, Supersilent, Arve is represented here by his solo work and collaborations outside of that band. This retrospective treatment uncovers the ritualistic properties of music, presenting an ever-deepening mystery from an initial  ceremony opening up sanctified soundscapes to the ultimate angelic ascent within a contemplative mountain shrine.

Part I Invisible Cities

Side A
Opening Image (4:16)
This is an audacious opening track from Chiaroscuro (2004), one of the first albums of Arve’s that I heard beyond Supersilent. It presents such a raw and isolated treatment of sound while demonstrating Arve’s various approaches to the trumpet … as effects processor, as percussive instrument, as flute and voice. The track is so worshipful, and Arve just goes for it vocally. Most of the track is so stark, but then there is this wonderful little fade out into space and mystery that suggests the more cosmic dimensions to come. It is the quintessential opening ceremony to clear out the old dust and call upon new energies.


Saraswati (4:29)
This track just drops you right into a churning bubbly melt that is so fantastic. I’ve never heard Arve working in such a Bitches Brew outtake mode. The string settings evoke a kind of spy theme, but there are some spacey shimmers that work as mystic sci-fi. This track moves into such a holy space. It felt like some transformation has occurred, and we reflect back on it in a state of bliss. This is, fittingly enough, from Places of Worship (2013).

Migration (5:41)
This track flows so perfectly from the space of “Saraswati” that sometimes I’ll forget and think they’re part of the same piece, it’s just such a fantastic extension and deepening of the other realm opened up there. The album that this track comes from -- Cartography (2008) -- is probably my go-to Arve. This piece is so cool, great late-night vibe that feels more urban than most of Arve’s jazz formats, an invaluable visit to a new place on the map. The bass in this track really lends the mix the cartographic waveforms, spatializing the mix down into the depths. Once again, Arve’s solo albums can drift into the most unexpected places. The cave that we get into in “Migration” is full of reverby percussive blows and a kind of water droplet sound. This track is great, too, for spacing out, but then it drops back into the melodic rhythm to take us out on the bass.

Yerevan (2:07)
Arve makes an appearance here on Lars Danielsson’s Liberetto (2012). It’s great to hear Arve in ensembles like this, contributing to a very organic statement by this thoughtful quintet featuring Lars Danielsson (bass, cello), Tigran (piano), Magnus Ostrom (drums), and John Parricelli (guitar).


Side B
Parallel Action (4:38)
Well, another one from Chiaroscuro so soon, but this track just sounded right as a re-entry into Arve’s solo work. Arve’s immersion in multiple languages of the trumpet is fascinating to me. This “parallel action’ is a statement about the diversity of settings in which he plays, but also about the many types of textures that Arve can add to a single track. I like being in this space where I’m unsure whether I’m hearing some technique Arve has honed, an electronic filter or other manipulation, or a combination. I’m prodded to wonder what synthesizer and electronic music will do after the electric era, and I hear something in this jazz that suggests a kind of “post-electronic music.”

Zat Was Zen … Zis Is Now (3:27)
Here, Arve appears on Stian Carstensen’s Backwards Into the Backwoods (2004), a weird Scandinavian hillbilly album full of ethnological forgeries like this Zen Garden of a track. I like how straightforward and unaffected Arve’s horn sounds here with the upper-register winds of the Carstensen’s kaval, all blowing over the restrained pluckings of the spinet, also played by Arve.

Mlouk (6:10)
Arve in a trio setting with Giovanni Di Domenico and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto on their album Distare Sonanti (2012). I love the synthesized elements underlying everything here. This is imaginary film soundtrack stuff, from a heavy psychological thriller, vaguely occult. The restrained but aggressive piano, the panned right drums, and Arve’s horn slipping at times toward something other than trumpet, so breathy with all that whispering. Then an actual voice. Who is this Mlouk? Something’s been summoned. One of Arve’s best dark pieces. After the creepy atmospheric break, the return of the theme is so cinematic climatic.

Assembly (3:56)
This track from Cartography confronts the dangerous energies of Mlouk with a song of psychic confrontation. A choir clears the space after Arve’s initial benediction, then we are off into a joyous space for the horn to play, floating around on top of such an engaging bed of sounds, little rips of static. This is too active for an ambient backdrop, it keeps taking me a bit by surprise, changes up for just long enough, then returns into something I remember, that loop made from instruments and sound sources I can’t even identify. From what dimension have we tuned this in, this cascading electric current, and something like voices again that reinforce the horn and get rid of the voice of Mlouk for once and for all? Something about this track suggests an Eno production, another Another Green World,  where the acoustic instrumental sound accrues this haze of processing that takes on a life of its own.

Nash Lontano (4:39)
Here, Arve performs as part of the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble on The Zoo Is Far (2007), a sombre blend of alternative jazz and post-classical chamber music. In a score, “Lontano” notes that the player should perform as if from a distance, something this track establishes right from the beginning of its slowly approaching fade in. The piano is plodding, heavy, but restrained, footsteps from far off. The track is upon us surprisingly suddenly after the long build-up, especially Arve’s soulful horn, with its downward turned melody -- somewhat uncharacteristic, this is, his melodic runs tend to go up the scale, not descending. Another melody line that picks at nostalgic threads. There is a heavy discordant modulation at times on the brass and piano, sudden outbursts from them that really stand out, and amplify an undercurrent of anxiety or anger that go along with this dark, depressed state. If this is at a distance, imagine what it must sound like right in front of you.

Day One (2:54)
One last track from Liberetto takes us out with some real after hours chill, again in that clean and organic horn setting that Arve favors with Lars Danielsson. There is a kind of smoky gray scale ECM chamber vibe on this whole album. The playing is present but cool, restrained but at the same time inspired, so vast the imaginary black and white stage, but also such vivid individual tone colors flickering through the darkness.



Part II Cosmic Music



Side C
Ascent (5:57)
After the subdued introduction, and the synthesizer strings appear, I am there, out of this pitter-pattering elemental landscape into some exquisite Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd sound garden. The horn proves to be the gift that this kind of cosmic music needed all along. The percussive chug at times underlying this material is always so perfect, as well, to prevent stagnation in a deep elemental way. Powerful forces are at work just around the peripheries of awareness. This is one of those tracks that I would love to inhabit, second only to “Bird’s-Eye-View.” It’s from Strojn (2007).

Bird’s-Eye-View (4:07)
This personal piece of fluttering avian consciousness comes from Chiaroscuro, a very spiritual album for me. There is so much essential Kosmische Musik on this album, but this is one of the most amazing pieces. The loopy winds and strings motif suggest Ralph Lundsten’s electronic post-classical compositions. The brief space-out that the track drifts into a little over halfway through is just so epic, sounding a bit Berlin School and then very Pink Floyd “Echoes,” which had a similar atmosphere in its central spaces, as well as its own extended gull calls to bring us back. This piece is so psychedelic. The sudden awakening of the flock at the end is fantastic and funny. Anyway, I don’t want to sound like I like this track just to play connect the dots, and here’s what I think it sounds like, and let’s do a family tree of this sound. It’s not a dry exercise. Rather, I think having heard Lundsten and Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh and Miles Davis and Joe Zawinul, I’ve been looking for someone to extend and enhance that overall creative project, to keep this sound alive through the breath and the circuits of those who have heard it. A single epic song lives on through these different composers and musicians, each channeling and adding to its substance. From this elevated position, we may conclude that a particular type of sound may exist beyond any given producer, and that a living sonorous object is waiting for those performers who can keep it alive and always becoming-new.

Portal (4:11)
From Places of Worship, this track takes us into contemporary classical spaces as it prepares us for the next phase of the night ahead, calming and chilling out to a deeper level. It seems we’ve almost lost the beat, but a cool bass and drums with a falling cascade of strings gives us one last late night cop show theme before a brief outburst of Arve’s voice puts us back in mind to the singer encountered in the opening image.

Black Mountain (5:05)
Another Tangerine Dream journey, cinematic and epic, a bit daunting and arduous at times, from Strojn. This is the epitome of Arve’s work and everything I have hopes to ever hear. Everything feels so gritty and slightly worn out, it feels like a very old recording, which is still triggering some of those nostalgic longings for Brain-era Tangerine Dream. The attention to that textural aging quality of the sound suggests more like Boards of Canada. This recording is an aged artefact from a parallel world; like new music evolved along a divergent pathway from a ‘70s somewhere else, transmitted here from that another timeline, a distorted mirror or altered Polaroid fantasy.

Side D
Viewing Infinite Space (3:12)
Another of those glorious Kosmische spaces that Arve taps into. These were the moments that I went looking for based on what I loved about Supersilent, then after getting my first solo album, Chiaroscuro. One of its kind on this early release,Sakuteiki (2001), this was just the kind of mysterious cosmic music I was hoping for. The horn just sounds vast, regal. It seems like it’s going to fade out, but then it gets so edgy at the end. But the dominant energy is like Popol Vuh, uniting a common ancestral acoustic sensibility with an electric shimmer of sound processing or synthesis. This is an ancient holy song, and it expands my consciousness by putting the sparkling edge of outer space on ordinary reality, drawing me back into a past I didn’t realize I had always inhabited.

Recording Angel (6:23)
The sound on this track from Cartography is so immense. Mysterious, beautiful, dark, perception fluttering just around the edges of consciousness, all aspects of the infinite bird’s-eye-view of the angel. The transformations that a single track undergoes is frequently amazing. I think that is part of the cinematic, or narrative, aspect of these experiences … though entirely suggestive, rather than fixed into a program by Henriksen. This piece takes off into 2001 territory, with the Ligeti-like tone clusters and choruses that take us out of the track and into expanded space after its major turning point.

Visa Till Fårö (arr. G. Eriksson) (4:15)
Arve performs here with the Oslo Chamber Choir under direction of Gunnar Eriksson and Grete Pedersen. His work is understated, at one point at its most flute-like, another very unprocessed. This sounds like the best of Enya to me, and I actually prefer this layering of actual, multiple voices compared to the multitrack processing and digital chorusing of Enya’s voice. This is such a lovely folk song, and again so fine to hear Arve working in a different context. This may be more Middle Earth fantasy than outer space, but I think it’s good for any sonic cosmonaut to have some memento that reconnects the body to the earth and to its legacies and songs.

Alpine Pyramid (1:29)
This is another majorly regal track from Strojn. The recording feels so crackling and aged. And yet not completely of this world, recorded from some far distance. The surface noise that I’m picking up, I think, is an artifact of Arve’s playing technique and a close-microphone. It’s near to hand but also sits at  very high altitude. Is all this an artifact of the recording angel at pyramid’s peak?




Bonus Single

Side A.  Chiaro (3:28)
From Chiaroscuro, “Chiaro” is mysterious, spiritual space music. The song feels ancient, a medieval hymn or something older with a holy cast. The bed of strange sounds and atmospheres that this voice sits on top of is so incredibly trippy, with more than a hint of danger or at least darkness, a  geographical soundscape that goes from ice cave to deep rain forest. “Chiaro” indicates luminosity, a strange word to associate with this track. It feels so dark. But perhaps the voice is the vivid sunrise that illuminates the shadowed obscurities.


Side B.  Glacier Descent (7:31)
There’s a Wagnerian sunrise quality to the start of this piece from Strojn. The “Glacier Descent” sustains a brilliant shimmery quality throughout. First the Icelandic throat singing, then the glorious synth bed and echoing processed voice put this squarely in a landscape shot from an imaginary Herzog film as Arve again channels Florian Fricke and Popol Vuh. Arve also creates a contemporary holy music that combines folk traditions from West and East along with electronic atmospheres. It’s too edgy and sublime to sound like prefabricated New Age. With throat-singing and yodeling, both lifting from the root of worshipful resonance, this is the most ascendent descent you will ever make.