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豪華ボックスセットにて登場、当店が激推しするダブルベース・プレイヤーの2026年新録!!間違いなく重要タイトル!!ノルウェー出身のダブルベーシストにして作曲家、クセナキスやベリオをはじめとする現代音楽家の楽曲、また自国の伝統音楽の演奏もしたりする強者プレイヤーHakon Thelin。自主レーベルPeninsula Audio Recordsより2026年4月に出版、同国のノイズミュージシャンLasse Marhaugデザインによるクールなボックス、数種のアートカード、ブックレットという豪華仕様で発表された新録[echoes and traces, together]。タイトルとなっている3つの楽曲はそれぞれエコーとトレースにちなんで名付けられており、本作はこれまでの演奏探求の延長線上にあるもの。シンバルを弦に直接当てその振動を拾う、また26本の等間隔に調律された音叉を叩いて鳴らし続けるといった、拡張した手法にてハードコアな録音に成功しています。







Custom made CD-box designed by Lasse Marhaug with CD, art cards by Hilde Flikke and booklet with texts by Håkon Thelin, Jennifer Wei Gersten, Maja S.K. Ratkje and Jonas Skaarud. Pictures by Jenny Rydhagen, Hilde Flikke and Sarah Ludwig-Simkin.

No instrument attracts purer devotees than the double bass, given that the will to carry such a hulking object out of the house every time one needs to perform requires a selflessness akin to martyrdom. Those besotted enough to volunteer themselves for the task will usually fall prone to a bass-specific nerdery; the instrument’s legacy is dotted with musicians who are not only performers but also researchers par excellence, who have spelunked through the depths of a centuries-old resonance cavern and are emerging still with new ideas and techniques.

Among the most vigorous of the contemporary spelunkers is the preeminent Norwegian bassist and composer Håkon Thelin, who, across the last 30 years of solo and ensemble work across Norway and broader Europe’s leading contemporary ensembles, has also committed himself to a host of idiosyncratic, solitary investigations into his instrument’s capacities. In previous solo albums, Thelin has pristinely encapsulated projects within Norwegian folk music, various tunings, and harmonics. The album at hand—"echoes and traces, together", including three pieces that are named after each component of that title—is in some regards an extension of this previous research, drawing upon the same level of technical precision, novelty, and focus. Simultaneously, Thelin is explicitly reacquainting himself with the fundamentals of his compositional practice, which he has defined, essentially, as negotiating between poles: tension and release, dynamism and stasis, solitude and togetherness. His musical materials, many of which he repeats or remixes throughout these three pieces, seem relatively economical in scope to begin with, but dispense their bounty over time as the listener learns to perceive their direction and resonance.

Much of this material occurs to the ear as fairly natural to execute, which is a testament to how smoothly Thelin conceives of even the works’ unconventional proposals. "echoes..." is also a matter of reconciling the bass with foreign objects that, through the composer’s doing, have found their footing in the instrument’s extended universe. One work enlists a usual suspect from the percussion section—a cymbal, applied directly against the strings for a strange sizzling effect, which, combined with the harmonic progression preceding it, leaves the instrument burning in its own vibrations. Another calls for 26 equally tempered tuning forks, which assistants strike and let ring as the bassist plays a series of repeated notes based on a fingering system, developed by Thelin, that allows the player to access a certain progression of harmonics, or partials. Thelin’s combination of formidable instrumental skill and composerly imagination means that these novelties seem organic in context, just another day in the life of an instrument around which revelation is par for the course.