Earlier this month, I flew across the country to see Norway's Supersilent play their first North American concert, at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Maybe I made the trip to remind myself that there are still bands worth making big, expensive trips for; maybe I was just excited for the experience of watching the band in person. The quartet plays completely improvised music that's wrestled into shape by four distinct musicians; on record, it's difficult to tell how the players interact. At the show, I felt like a car-illiterate driver popping his hood just to stare at the engine: I wanted to watch the pieces working together, even if I wouldn't know what was going on inside of them.
If Supersilent has a frontman, it's Arve Henriksen, who sat on stage between keyboardists and noise generators Ståle Storløkken and Helge Sten. In addition to playing trumpet into one of two mics (one had more distortion than the other), Henriksen also sings wordlessly, high and close to how I'd imagine an adult castrati would sound. Unlike a chamber singer, he sounds untrained, airy, and wholly naked: a broken plea stops your breath.
Henriksen has rarely used his voice on recordings with Supersilent, but it becomes a crucial instrument on his new solo disc, Chiaroscuro. After working in monk-like solitude on his first album, Sakuteiki ("a treatise on garden making"), he collaborates on Chiaroscuro with two notable Norwegian musicians, percussionist Audun Kleive and sound artist Jan Bang. The thick but passive atmosphere they create warmly blankets Henriksen's trumpet and vocals.
The album's most striking moment is its first track, "Opening Image". After a trumpet performance on which he struggles for breath-- making the brass instrument sound almost like a reed or a bamboo flute-- Henriksen emits a pure cry. It's such a personal revelation that you'd think professional training would ruin him-- not because it would strip away his beauty but because you'd know what to expect from note to note, and that would ruin the importance of his telling it to you.
Chiaroscuro could have been a late '70s ECM date-- from Kleive's ambiguously world influences to the enveloping moods to the sameness of the songwriting. It's so obviously beautiful that you don't feel challenged but right when you drift off, it creeps up on you: Kleive plays an inventive pattern-- for example, the hand drums on "Parallel Action"-- or a melody starts to sink in. If the album had more variety or used these fragile-sounding elements less cautiously, this would be an exceptional session.
At the concert, Henriksen also revealed a rougher side, first singing garbled scat vocals into his trumpet, and then using actual words, which was unexpected from an act as abstract as Supersilent. During a skronky noise piece, Henriksen screamed at us about the recent election: "OHIO! OHIO! WHY?! MOTHERFUCKER!" It may have grounded the musical flights but in blue state-housed Frisco, everyone loved it.
On the other hand, Ståle Storløkken almost disappointed me. On the Supersilent albums, it's hard to separate Storløkken's contributions from Sten's. He usually reveals himself by playing melodic synth lines while Sten sticks to brutally neutralizing tones that can raze any assertion down to an ambiguous grey. Storløkken is more colorful, so in this context he risks being banal by trumping the band's subtle compromises: His loudest riffs on 6-- the solos on "6.1" and the dominating statement that ends "6.4"-- suit the pieces, but just barely. In concert, Storløkken locked in brilliantly with Sten when they played loudly but in the slow sections, he almost started to noodle-- to play lines that were merely pretty.
But maybe I had an eye on him because I had just heard Humcrush, his new duet with drummer Thomas Strønen (Food). Humcrush gallops like a circus-- the first track is called "Acrobat"-- and it doesn't mind easy gestures: For example, the track called "Japan" sounds stereotypically Japanese. Both men use electronics to generate layers of beats, with Strønen adding rhythms that sound like playing cards on a window fan, but the live (in the studio) recording keeps even the densest textures frantic.
I love Storløkken's signature analog synth, even though every time I hear it I picture a little plastic spaceship being pulled across a movie screen on a wire; when Storløkken deploys it, he smears fusion-like lines across the top, while at others times-- like "Sport'n Spice"-- he uses a quick, digital jabbing sound to grapple head-on with Strønen. While different moods emerge, Humcrush is one of the least reflective discs in the Rune Grammofon catalog: It breezes by instead of lingering, which is not a bad thing when you're listening to such proficient musicians dance each other in knots.
Henriksen, Storløkken, and Helge Sten (as Deathprod) all released solo or duet records this year, and while each one has its strengths, Supersilent remains greater than the sum of their parts. The unique tension between their players creates something unique and frequently awesome. The humanistic, almost New Age-y Henriksen and the grimly neutral Sten especially become stronger when their different approaches are at odds with one another. But together or by themselves, live or on record, the members of Supersilent still have more to reveal, more corners they haven't explored. Hell, next time I might even fly to Oslo.
