Mette Henriette Martedatter Rølvåg, to give her her full title, is not a name that will be known to many outside Norway.
A tenor saxophonist of Sami heritage, barely out of her teens, she met producer Manfred Eicher by accident at a concert in her home town of Trondheim and talked her way to a double ECM debut album.
Over two CDs, the first with her trio and the second with her 13-piece ‘sinfonietta’, Mette Henriette expounds a fragile and slow-moving acoustic aesthetic, a sort of steam-punk minimalism, in which single ideas or motifs are drawn out over tectonic time periods.
The music is rarely hummable, but there is a conviction here, perhaps the utter certainty of youth, that gives this surprising debut album its own electrical charge.
