Nils Petter Molvaer "Hamada" available August 31st on Thirsty Ear

Source: Peter Gordon
July 6, 2010
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"A highly original composer/stylist with the courage to radically reinvent himself." --BBC

“Stunning growth and unexpected directional shifts make Hamada one of Molvær's most moving and challenging records to date." --All About Jazz

“He mixes his evocative landscape sound with a fiercer, even threatening quality imparted by startling percussion eruptions and formidable resources" --The Guardian UK

It has been a number of years since Nils Petter Molvaer (NPM) released a new studio album. Entering his 14th year since his groundbreaking ECM recordings Khmer first created a gasp and uproar in the staid Jazz world. NPM vision as a cinemagraphic sound shaper and jazz original has never been more focused and riveting to the ear.

The word “Hamada" is taken from the Arabian language and means dead, inanimately, congealed, lapsed. It is used as the geological term for a stone or rock desert with no or only little sand. Instead it is filled with edgy stones or rocks as a result of physical erosion.

It would be too obvious an interpretation of the album title though to compare the songs with the characters of a hamada and search for the rocky parts, the floating bits, the parching or the drowning, the thirst and the drought. All of that could be found, but in actual fact Nils Petter Molvaer discovered the album title while watching a report on National Geographic about an eremite who was walking through the desert and survived by eating lizards and insects. This inspired him to dedicate the song titles as well as the album title to planet earth and its nature phenomena and wonders.

It is Nils Petter Molvaer´s most angry and darkest album up to date with climaxes in the songs “Friction" and “Cruel Altitude" where he and his fellow musicians, Eivind Aarset (g) and Audun Kleive (dr), leave the paths of ambient, electronica and improvisation and get the axe out to poach in the fields of indie and '70s-prog-rock, before they cool it down to end the album on a more conciliatory note.

On Hamada Nils Petter Molvaer takes his musical approach to the next level and sucks the listener into his world of orgiastic sounds that create visual images in the listener's brain.

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Track Listing

Exhumation; Sabkah; Icy Altitude; Friction; Monocline; Soft Moon Shine; Monocline Revisited; Cruel Altitude; Lahar; Anticline.

Personnel

Nils Petter Molvaer

trumpet

Additional Instrumentation

Nils Petter Molvær: trumpet, voices (2-4, 8), beat programming (4), sound carpet (5, 7, 10), programming (6), metal percussion (10); Eivind Aarset: guitars (2-8, 10), programming (3, 6), bass (6), editing and arranging (6); Audun Erlien: bass (4, 8); Audun Kleive: drums (4, 8), editing (4, 8); Jan Bang: live sampling (5-7, 10), field recording (5, 6, 10), programming (5, 7, 10), editing and mixing (10).