12/05/2025
ANNOUNCEMENTH
Chamber by Hein Westgaard & Mat Maneri
Chamber is an album of improvised music recorded in Copenhagen in July 2024, featuring the Norwegian guitarist Hein Westgaard in an intimate duo setting with esteemed American violist Mat Maneri. Consisting of seven freely improvised pieces - the first four with Westgaard on electric guitar and the final three on acoustic steel-string guitar - the recording marks the very first time the two have played together.
On the album, Westgaard and Maneri work with harmony as a dynamic, ever-shifting force, where melodic threads and microtonal textures interweave to reveal moments of unexpected beauty. Their improvisations are rooted in deep listening and a shared curiosity, resulting in a form of music that is at once precise and free-flowing; both intimate and expansive.
In Hein's own words: “This album documents the first musical meeting between me and Mat one summer day in Copenhagen, in a lovely little studio run by the Danish studio engineer Jens “Benz” Søndergaard. A bottle of wine was procured for the occasion. While playing, I was impressed by Mat’s ability of deep concentration and focus, creating very intentional beginnings and endings for each improvisation. For every single take he would be waiting in silence for the right moment to begin - often thirty seconds or more, which can feel like a small eternity when you are about to play. Allowing for this repeated waiting-for-the-right-time-to-start pointed me towards the value of silence, patience, consistency, and the importance of the opening of a piece, how it sets the stage for the ensuing improvisation both emotionally and compositionally. In other words, the space between silence and music should be taken very seriously.
Through playing together, it seemed as though we naturally gravitated towards shorter forms, ranging from around four to fifteen minutes. A common thread through many of the pieces seems to be exploring harmony as the main material, sometimes in a clearly tonal direction, sometimes more towards an area that was more post-tonal and chromatic, even microtonal, not judging any aesthetic space as wrong or right, just allowing it to happen, sometimes intuitively splitting up into roles of soloist and accompaniment, other times melting together into a sort of harmony-machine. Not really avant garde, and not really conservative, perhaps melancholic but not nostalgic, harmony and melody were both welcome, although in an abstract manner, never settling too long in one place, like the memory of a song.”
https://gottaletitout.bandcamp.com/album/chamber
