VESPER
(Hubro)
8/10
Sometimes we listen too fast, so the music seems in slow motion. But music can only unfold at its own speed, and it’s we who must unwind enough to hear it; to be led into a world where chronological times stands still. In this collaboration with the Australian Art Orchestra, each instant of Norwegian guitarist Kim Myhr’s three-part suite, Vesper, brims with evocations, like the half-remembered smells of childhood.
The title of the opening I caught a glimpse of the sea through the leafy boughs of the pines prepares you for the dreaminess, in which any one fragment seems to have the whole 18 minutes’ duration printed on its DNA, despite assorted instruments appearing and disappearing in the sonic haze. After the undulations of the second section, the third is more agitated, and yet agitation, Myhr style, disquiets rather than perturbs. He’s joined by Peter Knight, Aviva Endean, Erkki Veltheim, Lizzy Welsh, Jacques Emery, Joe Talia and Tony Buck, the latter of the Necks, whose music is not a million miles from this. Myhr’s, too, casts spells, his own guitar shimmering like leaves in a breeze when the sun is at its zenith.