Manafonistas

Track Listing: Roll Back; Roll; Bounce Back; Ping Back; Bounce; Ping.

Personnel: Ivar Grydeland: tenori-on, guitars, banjo, mandolin, pedal steel guitar, ukulele, zither, keyboards. Xavier Charles: clarinet (5), „vibrating surfaces“ samples (6); Marius Tobias Hoven: trombone (2); Jonas Howden Sjøvaag: snare drums (2).

Full of wonder, rich in in its details, collected from several years, and, nevertheless, a strange unity with all its disparate elements, and a rather weird instrument called tenori-on that adds to the magic of a highly unconventional, but accessible collections of antiques and curious. One of the best Hubro releases anno 2012. Easy avantgarde. Purely instrumental. Guitars, too. Melodic lines and underlying weirdness. Amazing. The tilte suggests some under-water areas… Deliberately I’m not writing too much. The music leaves a lot of spaces open, the writers should not throw around their names and genres. It’s a bit disappointing when a musician says: – oh, I want to let the music for itself. Well, now, I’m saying exactly this.

Das tenori-on, sagt Wikipedia, besteht aus einem Magnesiumrahmen mit einer Matrix aus 16×16 LED-Tasten, über die wie bei einem Sequenzer kurze Loops und Patterns intuitiv programmiert und abgespielt werden können. Die Tasten dienen gleichzeitig zur Visualisierung der gespielten Musik. Auf der Rückseite befinden sich 16×16 LEDs, die während des Spiels spiegelverkehrt dieselben visuellen Effekte zeigen wie die Tasten der Vorderseite. Über eine MIDI-Schnittstelle können Daten mit anderen MIDI-fähigen Geräten ausgetauscht werden.

RLP 2137 – Arve Henriksen: Solidification (7LP)
PRICE: 899,00 

Solidification is a quite stunning 7LP box that includes his Rune Grammofon albums Sakuteiki, Chiaroscuro and Strjon, all with added bonus tracks, as well as a brand new album called Chron, his first since his ECM album Cartography. No corners have been cut  to make this a most desirable piece of art regarding design and sound. You get the music on classic black vinyl on six of the records while Chron is pressed on white vinyl.
If that isn´t enough the package includes two DVDs with all 56 tracks as 16/44 files, hi-res FLAC files and original master quality 24/44 or 24/96 files. Kim Hiorthøy´s design is as always consistent to the last detail and the beautiful 24 page booklet includes extensive liner notes from Fiona Talkington and John Kelman.

Arve Henriksen is probably Norway´s most versatile musician of his generation, always on the move, always searching and exploring possible and seemingly impossible paths. From the Rune Grammofon catalogue he will be known through the three solo albums, eleven releases as a founder member of groundbreaking improvising group Supersilent and four with Food (two of them on RG). He was a member of Christian Wallumrød Ensemble and has played and recorded with a large number of Norwegian and international musicians, most notably David Sylvian and Dhafer Youssef. In 2008 he released the album ”Cartography” on ECM.

See: Rune Grammofon (blog roll)