After eleven years from the last work “Dogs” and twenty -five from the debut “Hei”, the Norwegian Kim Hiorthøy, Sound-Artist Active between music for theater, dance and cinema, he returns with a subdued work, designed to seem played by a ensemble in flesh and blood. In eleven sketch of “ghost note” you listen to winds, pinched, metal percussion (“melody set”), as if they were fragments of waste, poetic residues between the cozy el 'eerie. The imagination is that of a small home concert: a group of artists collected in a loft That, with kindness, explores reductionism, polyritmies and sometimes atonality (“Wish Walk”), without ever transforming them into dogmas. Each sound is muffled, caresses and emotional as a Steve Reich intent on whispering insents (“Double Sword”) and declarations of love (“Computer Music”).
The impression is that of a gesture played, but that deceives. Indetermination, in fact, is the key to exploring this sound matter: is it performed? Is it scheduled? The artist describes the album as acoustic electronic music, played with non -existent instruments. Acusmatic elaborations are intertwined with timbrical organicity, in which each percussive accent seems to have its own character (“Smell Shirt”). But it is not so much the origin that counts, as the imagination that evokes: a discreet range of glitches progressions, melodies from prepared tools, diaphanous shades (“Book Legs”).
The aesthetic to which “Ghost Note” refers recalls an Arthur Russell or a Cameristic version Fred Frith, or a hypnagogical sound recalibrated on post-minimalism. After all, in this record it is not important which tools are used or how they are performed. Perhaps, the methodology is only an expedient to disclose a landscape, an atmosphere, cultivating a habitat sound deliberately lo-fimuffled, domestic. A Chamber-Music For empty rooms and ajar windows.
Without any desire to stand out or fascinating at any cost, that of Horthøy is a discreet and enchanted job, which insinuates itself delicately, grows without clamor and lets itself be inhabited slowly, like a family space.
31/07/2025
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
