In August, 2017, Alberto Novello, the Italian-born composer, programmer, and multimedia artist, and UK trumpeter/composer Tom Arthurs shared an ArtOMI residency in Ghent, New York. The four-week summer program was intended to bring together international artists for the purposing of fostering collaboration; this recording, made during the residency, is one such successful one.
For these performances, Novello, who uses the stage name Jestern, accompanied Arthurs’s acoustic trumpet with analogue electronics. The musical relationship the two forged is one of strong, independent and parallel voices that nevertheless provide complementary parts of a distinctive whole. This they do largely through contrasts of timbre and phrasing, given the particular capabilities of their instruments. Novello’s electronics are glitch and jumpy; even at their most abstract they allude, however obliquely, to rhythms rooted in the body: foot-tapping, finger-popping, knuckle-rapping. Their chopped sounds are a sonic bed over which Arthurs’s melodic lines lie—sometimes uneasily, sometimes comfortably, but always appropriately.
Daniel Barbiero
Avant Music News 