Hilde Marie Holsen - Lazuli [Hubro Music]

Scheduled for later this summer is "Lazuli", the fresh album effort by Norwegian trumpet-player Hilde Marie Holsen which she created for the highly acclaimed Hubro Music-imprint. With four tracks employing an amalgamation of trumpet and electronic soundscapes Holsen caters a menu of four compositions accumulating a total playtime of roughly 35 minutes, starting with the barely three minutes spanning "Orpiment", bringing forth an innocent, cineastic fusion of naturalistic trumpet scapes atop a brooding, slighty DarkAmbient reminiscing background whereas "Eskolaite" opens with a sudden, harsh eruption of noise and continues on a background foundation of scraping, crackling, swampy unrest over which the manipulated, echoing soft trumped floats like rays of sunlight over calm summer shores in the very early hours of the day, providing a dubbed out Future Jazz feel we all loved on records like "The Showroom Recording Series Vol. 1" a good two decades ago. With "Lapis", the third track on this longplay piece, we see the artist offering a pure, unaltered approach to her instrument, focusing on a simply, longing and beautiful melodic structure carefully morphed by a slight use of echoes and other sound FX before a dark'ish bass drone and several brooding modular works come into play whereas the albums final and main piece "Lazuli" stretches out over 16+ minutes, employing a darker, distorted feel bordering, yet not entering DarkAmbient realms while sending shivers down our spine with spontaneous warps and swamp glitches and a feel of an imminent, climaxing crescendo that actually never happens, leaving our senses on full alert over the tunes play time albeit drifting off into Ambient Trance-spheres around midway through, and full on melancholia and modular experimentation later. Great stuff.

Album artwork on Instagram!