release date: 1st of November 2019
Rune Grammofon are to release The Timeless Nowhere a 4LP set of unreleased material from Arve Henriksen. Taken from the past ten years the albums cover solo, collaborative and live performances. The four LP set includes CDs of the material and liner notes from The Hilliard Ensemble’s John Potter.
Consisting of unreleased material from around ten years back and up until 2019, “The Timeless Nowhere” is not a compilation in the traditional sense, but can still be seen as a career overview including many facets of his work, at the same time portraying an artist on an unstoppable quest for discovery through exploration. Indeed, these are also four individual albums that could easily have justified separate releases, but at this stage in Arve´s artistic journey it also made perfect sense to assemble them as a box set. The common denominator is about inspiration drawn from composers, collaborators, new discoveries and more specifically; spontaneous interaction with other musicians without other purposes than the music itself. No talk, no demands, no intentions, no explaining; just music in a timeless nowhere.
Please have a look below how lovely is that Quadruple LP bill presented with all the details and covers appearing and demonstrated for you.
”The Timeless Nowhere” consists of 42 tracks distributed across 4 individual albums, each with stunning artwork by Kim Hiorthøy and assembled in a sturdy slipcase. ”Towards Language – Live at Punkt” has previously only been available for streaming and downloads, while the 3 other albums consist of brand new material as well as previously unreleased selections from the past 10 years, carefully assembled by Arve into albums that could have been released separately. That said, while showing many facets of an artist on a seemingly unstoppable quest for for discovery and exploration, there´s also a remarkable unity to these tracks, possibly due to longtime collaborator Jan Bang who features across the board in various roles. ”The Timeless Nowhere” fits well into a lineage of albums like ”Chiaroscuro”, ”Places of Worship” and ”Towards Language”, and serves as a great introduction into Arve´s musical universe, at the same time being an indispensable treasure trove for fans and followers.
Captured Under Mountainsides points to the wild landscape scenery of the area where Arve grew up in the western part of Norway; overwhelming and often strikingly beautiful, but also isolated and with a sense of melancholy.
SIDE A
amazed by its beauty
from a distance
fog and light
traces, marks and imprints of time
abandoned schoolhouse
valley echolocation
the storyteller
SIDE B
the painter, the poet and the past
bedehus – house of prayer
tún – old remains of settlement
water inscriptions
tilia cordata
Captured under Mountainsides lets us contemplate something of the physical world in which Arve grew up, but it’s a metaphysical construct. The music is often sparse, hinting perhaps at the isolation of a human experience in such a vast landscape. The titles summon up opaque images – distance, abandonment, ruins, prayer, fog; triggers, Arve calls them, which fire up the creative process back in the studio. The lingering sense of melancholy comes not just from the landscape: the title Captured under Mountainsides came to him after the death of his oldest brother, who also climbed the mountains of Stryn and shared his awe of the natural world but succumbed to cancer while the album was being compiled. The seeds for the individual tracks were sown on the road over a period of a decade, and folded into the history are three studio tracks featuring a number of Arve’s longterm collaborators. “The Painter, the Poet and the Past” dates from the Places of Worship (RG, 2013) sessions with Jan Bang and Erik Honoré in 2012. “Tún – Old Remains of Settlement” was recorded in Reykjavik with Skúli Sverrisson and Hilmar Jensson while recording Saumur, inspired by the discovery of an old Viking settlement similar to those found in Norway and featured in Icelandic sagas. “Tili Cordata” is another collaboration with Jan Bang, and is influenced by “Opening Image” from Chiaroscuro (RG, 2004) and “Smågutedagane” from Eg gjekk ned til denne fjorden (Arve Music, 2017).
taken from John Potter’s liner notes
Acousmograph is Arve on his own, inspired by compositions and musicians, more experimental in nature and partly based on sketch recordings in odd locations.
SIDE A
shadow lines
prelude unfolding
pathless forest
cinématique graphique
port of call
monochrome garden
SIDE B
the timeless nowhere
chamber calibration
embracing life of solitude
dimly lit frescoes
point of departure
Acousmograph is entirely different, a collection of exuberant experiments undertaken between 2007 and 2017. Here is Henriksen on his own, mining the potential of his instrument, coaxing it into territory both familiar and unfamiliar, filtered through the collaborations with his friends and contemporaries but also informed by the music of classical composers with whom he could collaborate only in his own head, Carl Nielsen, Krzysztof Penderecki, John Cage and Helmut Lachenmann. The trumpet emerges from a background of electronic sounds – is it actually a trumpet? Is that him singing? Is it a flute or some hybrid yet to be invented? It doesn’t matter, of course, the point being that you use the resources you have to dissect, analyse, synthesise, re-order until your material coalesces into coherence. A key element in these transformations is the use of improvisation as a tool to generate orchestrations, colouring and shaping the improvised source material into compositions (hence the references to his composer models). But unlike conventional composition, in the music of Arve Henriksen nothing seems permanent, it’s rather a series of stops on a journey that may never be completed.
taken from John Potter’s liner notes
Photo / Copyrights: Źiga Koritnik
Cryosphere is a co-production with long time collaborator Jan Bang re-modelling material from a series of evolving concert performances.
SIDE A
origin
perfectly diffuse
subsurface
radiative
eating stars
SIDE B
intoku
levitation
aerial
myosis
Cryosphere is a co-production with Jan Bang, with Bang re-using, re-layering, re-mixing and re-inventing material generated in the first instance between Henriksen and percussionists Audun Kleive, Helge Norbakken and Ingar Zach. Jan Bang sampled a series of evolving concert performances and then re-visited the material in the Punkt studio five years later, aided and abetted in by two of his students, Kristian Isachsen and Walter Laureti, from the University in Agder, Kristiansand. There are also echoes of the 2008 ECM album Cartography, where the groove sample from “Migration” reappears in a completely new environment as “Origin”, in another example of Henriksen’s use of improvisation to generate new orchestrations and open up hitherto unknown musical choices. This ability to extract an infinite amount of juice out of rich and variegated fruit has been a key part of Henriksen’s work for many years. Constant renewal is the motor which drives all artists, and the tracks on this album may perhaps still not have reached their final form. One can imagine Bang and Henriksen getting together in ten years time and re-booting the material into yet another dimension.
taken from John Potter’s liner notes
Towards Language – Live at Punkt could be seen as a departure from Arve´s usual approach, but at the same time it´s not. This is not a static run through – Arve would never allow that – but rather the kind of re-imagining process that is such a vital part of his music making.
SIDE A
traces of words
aspirations
patient zero
towards language
guarded
groundswell
SIDE B
turf war
vivification
biding time
paridae
Much of Arve Henriksen’s recorded output is generated from music created in the moment, even if it uses additional resources and pre-planned shapes or structures. Towards Language – Live at Punkt reverses this process and is a live recording of music that has had a previous life as a digital recording. Although this appears to be a kind of meta-level departure from his usual approach, in fact the key processes of re-imagining existing material and re-inventing musical artefacts are at the very heart of the album. It also offers the same challenges to listeners, who may ask what live means in this context. It was live for the performers, and on first listening we listeners will be with the musicians all the way in the white heat of creation. But will it still be live the next time we listen to it?….
taken from John Potter’s liner notes
***
arve henriksen: the timeless nowhere
Format: 4LP (includes 2CD)
Catalogue Number: RLP3210
Release Date: November 1st 2019
You can BUY the timeless nowhere here: