Acclaimed trumpeter/soundscaper Hilde Marie Holsen follows up her critical hit mini-album debut, 'Ask', with the dark and mysterious 'Lazuli', a suite of four compositions inspired by visual art and named after minerals used to colour paint.
"All the electronic sounds on the album are still live and processed trumpet, as they were on 'Ask'" says Holsen. "Since 'Ask', I've been exploring, among other things, different ways to play the acoustic trumpet, both conventional and unconventional, trying to find different timbres that can also give a larger register of processed sound in the electronic soundscape. The music on 'Lazuli' began as improvisation, and then later on I've had the chance to do minor adjustments and edits on the tracks. 'Lazuli' came about through a collaboration with the artist and painter Tyra Fure Brandsæter… The titles on the album are an homage to this collaboration: they are all different types of minerals that have been used as colour pigment in painting."
'Lazuli's' combination of beautifully pure-toned, almost classical-sounding acoustic trumpet with an often dark and dense forest of electronically manipulated noise, is devastatingly effective. We seem to hear what might be snuffling animals or squelching sci-fi film FX alongside random clicks and glitches or rumbling, ominous, industrial machine-hum, together with gentler sounds from a more lyrical or pastoral realm: snatches of sleigh or shepherd bells, perhaps the mystical half-echo of a tamboura drone. As the ambient sounds have themselves been triggered by the trumpet through various electronic plug-ins or captured by re-processing the instrument's total sound-making potential, from blowing to sucking to playing as percussion, there is no real gap between one and the other, reinforcing the organic nature of the entire artistic process, from first puff to final parp.
