HOLSEN, HILDE MARIE Lazuli

"LP version. 2018 release. Acclaimed trumpeter/soundscaper Hilde Marie Holsen follows up her critical hit mini-album debut, Ask (2015), with the dark and mysterious Lazuli, a suite of four compositions inspired by visual art and named after minerals used to color paint. Hilde Marie Holsen's Lazuli is an almost shockingly complete musical statement. It's as if an intense dialogue between the processes of composition and improvisation, and the interplay of sound and music, has led to the creation of experimental and often challenging work that nevertheless comes across as absolutely fully-formed; as inevitable, even. The result is a kind of monumentality, where to change just one element of the final text becomes impossible to contemplate, despite the whole thing remaining, at another level, entirely provisional and contingent, as immaterial as air itself, and perhaps closer to the idea of a sonic atmosphere than to most definitions of what constitutes music. "Element" is significant, too, for Hilde Marie Holsen's implicit thematic touchstones for Lazuli -- the chemical minerals used to create pigment in paint, and the idea of painting with sound, together with her own intuitive methods of production, continually working and re-working her material until the art reveals itself -- relate in some way to the notion of alchemy. If not quite turning base matter into gold, Holsen is taking the sounds made by her trumpet and refashioning them through a combination of breath and electronic processing, into vivid new life. The parallels with visual art are also evident in the way Hilde Marie Holsen has worked to develop each of the four pieces that make up Lazuli (whose epic title track forms the concluding part of the quartet, at sixteen minutes the longest by some distance; the other titles are, in order, "Orpiment", "Eskolaite", and "Lapis". It's as if the background of silence or gentle electronic flutter against which she begins, corresponds to a painter's preparatory white ground, which is then overlaid, sound upon sound, to create a thick impasto of textural detail heavy with potential meaning. In the palimpsest of the finished track, the clarity and immediacy of the recorded sound becomes almost three-dimensional, so real you feel you could reach out and touch it." - Hubro