EHM is a Copenhagen-based free-improv trio, featuring Norwegian trumpeter Erik Kimestad Pedersen, Swedish guitarist Henrik Olsson and Brasilian vocal artist Marcela Lucatelli, and focusing on intense, dense and brutal sonic collisions that require the three musicians to employ all their inventive powers and extended techniques. Or as EHM calls it: fully accommodating the music you’ve always desired but never wanted to hear. «Achromatopsia» is the second album of EHM, following its self-titled album from 2017.

Nothing is obvious or predictable in the chaotic, dadaist commotion of EHM, not even the singular extended techniques of Pedersen, Olsson and Lucatelli. Lucatelli is possessed by her own juicy, wordless stories and sonic images, surprisingly sensual, ecstatic and suggestive ones, at times bringing to mind Dutch vocal artist Jaap Blonk in his most dadaist moments. Pedersen and Olsson do their best to subvert the mysterious logic of these loose storylines and kidnap them to even wilder and absurdist terrains. But somehow, EHM has already solidified its own aesthetics, extreme, raw and demanding in its sheer brutality but also imaginative and poetic aesthetics.

Macon Holt, who wrote the liner notes, mentions that «Achromatopsia» refers to a condition in which color is absent from vision. And if we don’t see the colors in «Achromatopsia», maybe we should surrender ourselves to the way EHM reinvents and re-calibrates its own palette of colors, sounds and vocabulary. And this is what EHM does, in its own twisted and eccentric way, choreographing tender and passionate dances of sonic godzillas who only wish to enjoy the infamous Danish «hygge».

Eyal Hareuveni

Marcela Lucatelli (v), Erik Kimestad Pedersen (tp), Henrik Olsson (g)

EHM – ALICE Archives from Marcela Lucatelli on Vimeo.