From Norway, the trumpeter Hilde Marie Holsen brings us her Ediacara (PELUN RECORDS PELUNCD001) solo record. Over three long tracks, she attempts to depict – or possibly recreate – three separate geological periods, starting with the Ediacaran whose time span was about 635 to 538.8 million years ago, and taking us through everyone’s personal favourite, the Cambrian era, right up to the Ordovician. She does it by feeding her trumpet through live electronic processing, and all the pieces were freely improvised, presented here with no editing. Given the long form of the pieces – 12-16 mins or thereabouts – this is no small achievement, especially as she elects to play with great slowness and deliberation, suggesting that the performance and recording was a very internalised, near-isolationist action, requiring concentration and inner resources. Me, I prefer the slightly abstract and icy danger of ‘Kambrium’ to the rather sentimental romance of the title track, and would have cashed in my chips on a whole album of crazy, tuneless, soaring drones. But that’s not the point. There is an attempt to literally depict, in sound, the changes in evolution proposed by the geological time scale – organisms, climate change, continent formation, that sort of thing, but the progress is rather hard to discern, perhaps deliberately so. Holsen has form, if you look at her previous release Lazuli, which zeroed-in on the minerals that were used to make oil paints for old-school easel painters such as Vermeer; my guess is that she’s not especially interested in oil painting, or pigments, or even the minerals themselves, and that instead she sees everything as a metaphor of something else. If that’s right, Ediacara might contain some useful life lessons for the human race. (01/06/2023)
New York composer Christine Giannone with her Reality Opposition (ROOM 40 RM4203) offers us five rather bleak pieces of drone music, intended to express her own “dissociation” with the world, a mental blight that she has managed to turn into artistic capital here, rather than dispelling it through a ten-year stint with a psychiatrist. “Acceptance feels like resignation” is one of many world-weary observations she makes about herself and about this process, one which is evidently personally painful for her and has involved a good deal of sacrifice. This release is today connecting slightly more successfully than her Zone 7, which we heard in 2022; I’m all in favour of an artist grappling with these big mental forces, but in Giannone’s case her near-blank music seems to have become almost completely adrift, nothing familiar in view, untethered by any form of reality. (01/06/2023)
A Constellation of Anomaly (THANATOSIS PRODUKTION THT26) is performed by Vasco Trilla almost entirely using percussion instruments, or objects that he can strike or make vibrate or bring into life through bowing actions. This Barcelona performer is often seen and heard in group improvisation collaborations, but here he is going solo, attempting to “expand the limits of the instrument”. I like the lyrical titles such as ‘The Mirror of Circulation’ and ‘Opaque Epiphanies’, but they are in contrast to the rather prosaic, slow, self-describing music, where each piece’s main virtue is simply the number of unusual instruments and objects in play, emanating odd noises. Still no advance on Acoustic Masks, heard in 2022, which likewise failed to ignite much passion here. (01/06/2023)