Arve Henriksen has made his name by being a trumpeter who doesn’t really sound like a trumpeter. On his albums for ECM and Rune Grammofon, on collaborations with the likes of David Sylvian and Iain Ballamy, or when playing as part of the band Supersilent, he can sound as if he’s playing a shakuhachi flute, a whistle or a conch shell. He creates haunting timbres by attaching a saxophone mouthpiece to his trumpet, or not using a mouthpiece at all; he makes odd harmonics by using half-valve techniques or exploiting deliberate “leaks” in the trumpet.
On this project the Norwegian finally meets a band who can match him. The MultiTraction Orchestra were formed in 2020, when the Detroit-born, London-raised, Kraków-based guitarist Alex Roth assembled 27 musicians from all over the world for an epic track entitled Emerge Entangled, recorded remotely under lockdown. This belated follow-up revisits the free spirit of that 2020 session, but with a much smaller and more focused cast. Like Henriksen, all six of his bandmates use extended techniques to push the limitations of their instruments and shift between many registers: from the medieval minimalism of Part IV (where Kate Ellis’s creaking, multitracked cello sounds like a hurdy gurdy) to the distorted, rhythmically unsettling post-rock of Part II (where saxophonist James Allsopp freaks out over Ruth Goller’s rumbling bass lines).
Best of all are the tracks anchored around Rhodri Davies’s harp adornments – particularly the ecstatic astral jazz of Part III, and the terrifying, squalling, one-chord drone of Part V. Throughout, Henriksen draws from his arsenal of haunting effects – a mix of flute-like breathiness, pinched flourishes and speech-like muttering – while his bandmates make similarly strange sounds from their own instruments. This is entirely acoustic music, but the unusual techniques give it a spectral quality – these sounds don’t seem of this world.
Also out this month
Nuc (released 14 April, Mercury KX) is a collaboration between the Scottish composer Anna Meredith and the London-based Ligeti Quartet that is at its best when it pushes the string section to its limits, as with the slurring microtonality of Honeyed Words, the shimmering irradiance of Chorale, or the wonderfully demented minimalism of Shill.
Issei Herr is a cellist whose album Distant Intervals (NNA Tapes) was recorded at her home studio in her Brooklyn apartment. She multitracks harmonies, percussive pizzicato sounds and nontonal effects to the point where each piece glistens and throbs with life, like a full orchestra.
Hania Rani’s latest album On Giacometti (Gondwana Records) is the soundtrack to a documentary about the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Most of it comprises her simple, meditative, wintry melodies, played on a muted, echo-laden upright piano in the Alpine mountains, but the best moments – such as Allegra, Struggle and In Between – see her creating a pleasing blur of sound by setting rippling arpeggios against woozy string arrangements.