Hilde Marie Holsen: Lazuli
Hubro
I have the greatest respect and admiration for a musician like Hilde Marie Holsen. This young trumpeter could conceivably have pursued a commercial path, with all the attention and financial rewards such a choice often brings; instead, she's committed herself to a more adventurous soundscaping style that most certainly guarantees a smaller audience, if one no less appreciative of her work. Recorded at Oslo's Galleri RAM on June 6th, 2017, Lazuli, a fine follow-up to her mini-album debut Ask, presents four experimental trumpet-and-electronics settings whose titles—“Orpiment,” “Eskolaite,” “Lapis,” and, of course, “Lazuli”—derive from the chemical minerals used to create pigment in paint.
Similar to Ask, all electronic sounds on Lazuli are live and processed trumpet, but true to her explorative nature, Holsen's dedicated the time since the debut to different approaches to the acoustic trumpet, trying, in her own words, “to find different timbres that can also give a larger register of processed sound in the electronic soundscape.” The project developed through a collaboration Holsen undertook with painter Tyra Fure Brandsæter, with the two using each other's expressions as inspirations for their respective performances and production. Though the temptation naturally arises to draw parallels between the way a visual artwork is built layer by layer and the painterly way Holsen shapes her elements into a finely textured whole, her pieces ultimately hold up perfectly well without reference to anything outside them.
The settings are industrial-electronic-landscapes through which her horn travels, the warmth of its soft purr offset by the granular noise, whirr, and flutter of the surround. In contrast to the becalmed quietude of the opener “Orpiment,” “Eskolaite” sees woozy trumpet expressions emerging from a thick jungle of scratchy noises and ominous rumblings, the echoplexed result not wholly unlike what one might hear on a typical Jon Hassell recording.
As committed as she is to experimental sound design, Holsen isn't without a lyrical side, too, as evidenced by the gentle trumpet playing with which the sombre dronescape “Lapis” gets underway. The dramatic title track's the album's standout, however, which, at seventeen curdling minutes is precisely what one might expect. A deep plunge into dark ambient territory, it's Holsen at her most uncompromising, an oft-nightmarish, insectoid sound painting that conjures images of destroyed landscapes and smoldering ruins. Effectively timed at thirty-minutes, Lazuli certainly won't have anyone thinking of Chuck Mangione or Herb Alpert, but one images Holsen wouldn't want it any other way.September 2018