Solo Henriksen

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The Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen’s new album, Kvääni, is the latest in his growing collection of digital-only releases, ones that complement the physical (LP, CD, etc.) albums he records for such labels as ECM and Rune Grammofon. While the arrangements on Kvääni are quite fleshed out at times — there’s Henriksen’s own electronically processed trumpet, plus backing pads, and percussion, and voices, and myriad other elements — the record is entirely of his own making. He has the sole credit as performer. It’s a solo record in the literal sense, but here he is very much a one-man band. There are echoes of Peter Gabriel in “The Mountain Plateau” and of course of Jon Hassell (it’s hard to send a trumpet through a guitar pedal and not being him to mind as a forefather) throughout, but it’s also very much Henriksen’s music: elegiac and wintery, blurring the lines between the analog embouchure and the digital processing, between studio recording and field recording. Some track titles provide a sense of their origin: “My Father from Isolahti” indeed includes the recorded speaking voice of an elderly man, and “On a Riverboat to Bilto” sounds like it was recorded outdoors, bits of wind noise and a lower fidelity than much of the rest of the album. With 20 tracks total, Kvääni feels like a collection of snapshots of Henriksen’s recording process, which provides its own sort of intimacy, a peek into his process.