Ambrose Akinmusire & Mary Halvorson, Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings Review

by Stamish Malcuss

A duo leaves very little room for musical decisions to disappear. Without a rhythm section establishing pulse or a larger ensemble distributing harmonic and formal responsibilities, each new sound has the potential to redirect the music. Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and guitarist Mary Halvorson, make that exposure productive. Melody, interval, repetition, silence, processed sound, and instrumental color continually change roles, allowing two musicians to create structures that can feel composed while remaining responsive to the possibilities of improvisation.

Released by Nonesuch Records, Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings brings together four compositions by Akinmusire, four by Halvorson, and the jointly composed “Soundcheck.” The album is the product of a musical relationship extending back to 2009, and that history matters. Their interaction rarely sounds as though one player is waiting for the other to finish an idea. Instead, an event introduced by either musician can become something for both to develop.

“Prelude in the Ash” offers a relatively transparent introduction to the duet. Akinmusire begins with a dark, soulful trumpet sound and a melody whose descending scalar shapes have something of a folk-song directness. The rhythm is present not merely in the attacked notes but in the duration of the held tones; even sustained pitches contribute to the phrase’s forward motion.

Halvorson’s entrance changes the meaning of that melody without obscuring it. Two related guitar sonorities and their arpeggiated shapes establish a harmonic environment around the trumpet. Their upper colors complicate the apparent simplicity of Akinmusire’s line, while the separation between the instruments allows both melodic direction and harmonic friction to remain audible. As effects enter Halvorson’s guitar sound, they also introduce rhythmic accents. Guitar therefore moves from harmonic setting toward another role without requiring an explicit formal boundary.

That fluidity is pronounced on Halvorson’s “This Vivid.” A repeated trumpet figure is broken into rhythmic segments while high-register guitar chords establish another layer. Akinmusire’s voice enters with a scream that cuts across the developing texture. More guitar lines accumulate, processed and live materials overlap, and what initially sounds like a collection of separate gestures gradually acquires a perceptible rhythmic cycle.

The combined sound of each event is important. There is no drummer supplying a groove beneath these events. Instead, repetition produces pulse, and pulse allows the accumulating layers to produce groove.

The resulting form can be heard in the density of the music. Parts continue to accumulate until the texture reaches a climax and then recedes toward only a few remaining elements. That thinning functions almost like a sectional marker. From the reduced texture, Halvorson’s guitar introduces a different metric impulse, and the new pulse begins to organize what follows. Layers accumulate again, but because their rhythmic foundation has changed, the second buildup does not simply reproduce the first.

The electronics consequently matter for reasons beyond their sonics. Akinmusire was using a delay pedal newly introduced to him for these sessions, while processing has long been integral to Halvorson’s guitar language. Neither treats the resulting sound merely as an effect placed on top of an otherwise completed musical statement. A note can return with enough identity to demand another response: the musician plays, the processor transforms or repeats the event, and that altered sound becomes part of what happens next.

“Ofo” applies a related principle to interval and harmony. A tense major seventh is central to the opening material, and both musicians find different ways of expressing its character. Rather than functioning simply as a colorful interval inside a chord, it becomes an identifiable object whose tension can persist while the surrounding music changes.

Halvorson’s guitar moves through folk-like patterns colored by upper extensions and shifting tonal centers, at moments suggesting a Middle Eastern inflection. Akinmusire’s trumpet remains intensely lyrical within that less settled harmonic environment. As samples accumulate and a descending figure develops in the guitar’s lower register, the music gathers energy toward a high trumpet note. The arrival feels consequential because the preceding events have made it so: register, repetition, harmony, and density have all contributed to the ascent.

What follows is a significant shift. Instead of maintaining the accumulated intensity, the duo releases it. The music settles gracefully and returns toward its earlier material, but the major-seventh tension that defined the opening no longer carries quite the same weight. Return therefore does not mean reset. What happened in between has altered how the original idea is heard.

That quality is central to the duo’s communication throughout Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings. Akinmusire and Halvorson have played together intermittently for years, and their familiarity can be heard less in predictability than in their willingness to leave musical roles unsettled. Neither player needs to remain accompanist or soloist for long. More significantly, neither instrument must remain what its conventional identity suggests.

Electronics, trumpet and guitar can establish harmony, operate contrapuntally, generate pulse, supply bass motion, or become a source of altered sound. Even the distinction between acoustic and electronic material begins to lose explanatory value. Processed sounds can behave melodically and rhythmically, while the unprocessed instruments can be as percussive or textural as they are lyrical.

The result is music whose freedom is in the shapes emerging from musical units. An interval introduced early can govern what follows. A repeated fragment can establish pulse. Increasing density can produce a climax, while subtraction can announce a new section. A sound produced by one musician can return transformed and become the reason for the other’s next decision.

Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings continually reconsiders what each musical event can become. In doing so, they make listening itself part of the compositional process: one sound produces another possibility, and those possibilities accumulate into form.