Birgit Uhler: Trumpet
Ernst Thoma: live Electronics
"Slants" - Biases, inclinations, or metaphorically: the manner of approaching things. And the approach of Birgit Uhler and Ernst Thoma to combining trumpet with electronic music adds an unmistakably new slant to existing recordings featuring this line-up. Not the lyricism of the lonesome trumpet, muted where possible to heighten the effect - Miles, take a bow! - in the jungle of programmed beats, loops and sounds one knows from, say, the well known recordings by Ben Neills, Graham Haynes or Toshinori Kondo.
No, here we can hear a different take on things, different facets, new slants. The trumpet as breath machine which roars, rattles, clatters and crackles; as authentic partner in a dialogue with a live electronic instrument "the blue wheel instant composing machine" (developed by Ernst Thoma himself), a machine that uses the spectrum of sound between sine wave purism and "white noise" to facilitate a polyphony of sound layers and tonal qualities.
Seven "slants", seven different angles of approach to the subject: six concise dialogues and a truly symphonic epilogue, lasting almost half an hour without disintegrating into episodes. And then suddenly, subliminally, the pulses and beats are indeed there - but so much more subtly than in those productions which, though they may bring trumpet and electronic music together, fail to discover "the ghost in the machine". Here one may with equal confidence take "ghost" in the sense of "spirit" or "spectre", according to inclination, in accordance with one’s own personal "slant".
Tracks:
1 Aquamarin
2 Forestgreen
3 Orangered
4 Violet
5 Midnight
6 Pongopink
7 Skyblue
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