Arve Henriksen/Harmen Fraanje
Touch of Time

Arve Henriksen trumpet, electronics
Harmen Fraanje piano
Recorded January 2023 at Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Max Franosch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: January 26, 2024

Touch of Time marks the debut of a duo project from Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen and Dutch pianist Harmen Fraanje. Their alchemy of original material, yielding equal parts silver and gold, may just be the finest ECM album of 2024.

A slightly metallic drone runs through the spinal cord of “Melancholia,” where Henriksen’s keening sensibilities and Fraanje’s edgework coalesce into a time-lapse portrait from multiple angles. Through this canvas, we are introduced to a nostalgia that runs deeper than the memories of a single lifetime. Rather, the encounter feels multi-generational and shields its candle against the gusts of history without so much as a flicker of doubt. This truth holds throughout the session, culminating in the searching movements of “Passing On The Past.”

Going one step further into these concentric pieces brings us to “The Beauty Of Sundays,” in which the creative signatures of these two sonic greats are so enmeshed that picking apart where one ends and the other begins grows more difficult as the melodies unfold. Even in “Red And Black,” which is largely pianistic, one feels pieces of each in the other.

All the tunes herein are living photographs. “Redream” is a decidedly familial one that arrives at a gong-like interior. “Winter Haze” suggests an externally manifested yet internally understood landscape, as much rural as it is urban.

Whereas in “The Dark Light,” Henriksen plays chordally through the trumpet with electronic shrouds dissolving to reveal an eddy of piano, the title track unleashes an ocean in which sand castles are dissolved by the tide of mortality. 

“What All This Is” and “Mirror Images” comprise the central dyad. Between the former’s soft textures (a sensitivity that turns stone into feathers) and the latter’s technological swirl, there is so much light that we can only close our eyes against the dawn and be grateful for all that brought us to these moments.

This is music that looks in the mirror until it slips through the glass to take the place of its own reflection.