Happy Thief - Hello Cacus!

Label: Ears&eyes Records, 2022

Personnel - Elias Stemeseder: piano; Petter Asbjornsen: bass; Federico Isasti: drums.

Happy Thief is an exploratory triumvirate whose first work, Hello Cacus!, resulted from the strong musical connection established by its two founding members: the Norwegian bassist Petter Asbjornsen and the Argentinian drummer and audiovisual software developer Federico Isasti. Days after meeting at a New York residency, the twosome bumped into the Austrian pianist Elias Stemeseder, best known for his work with drummer the Jim Black and guitarist Nels Cline, and the compositional concept gained a concrete shape.

It’s far from ordinary what these guys do here, and we have that notion right from the start. “For Petter” starts off with spiky rolling drums that, at some point, fixate in a quintuple-meter figure. Cross rhythms and undercurrents are a constant throughout these musings, and the intriguing tones take us to a minute of entropy by the end. The following piece, “No. 3”, conjures a similar mood, yet, adding a tad more bliss to the melodic motifs and exposing those polyrhythmic counteractions created by bass and drums in an accented response to the piano playing.

Nuances in tempo and texture mark “Tren A Formia”, which alternates busy rhythms with quietly sober moments. There are also “Gammal Ice”, where a revamped bass figure works as the spinal axis of an asymmetric 24-beat cycle, and “Federico’s Idea”, which draws our focus from harmony toward rhythmic displacement. There’s a sense of amorphousness within the structure that feels greater in pensive numbers such as “Great Title” and “Lagerbygning”, both marked by the unshowy, rich brushwork of Isasti. 

Happy Thief creates architecturally inquisitive music that shimmers in its own dialect. Considerable doses of ambiguity in the interlocking cadences will make listeners search regularly for a palpable trajectory, and that’s the most rewarding aspect of this recording.

Favorite Tracks:
01 - For Petter ► 02 - No. 3 ► 03 - Tren a Formia