7. Every conceivable trumpet
May 10th, 2020

AAESPO - 9
(File under: music, horns, constraints)

Listen: aaronesposito.bandcamp.com/track/9

AAESPO’s Layers is a record comprised entirely of one trumpet pretending to be a dozen trumpets. I first heard ‘9’ on the second season of Joe Pera Talks With You (mentioned back in the second issue of this newsletter), and it ticked several of my boxes:

✅ Horns
✅ Creative constraints
✅ Gentle, unspecified melancholy
✅ An excuse to use the word polyphonous
✅ Songs under two minutes long
✅ Songs that could accompany the moment in a movie where a windswept character has an epiphany on a mountain

The internet seems to suggest the correct collective noun for trumpets is a flourish, which feels right—there’s flourishing on this record, but also looping and layering, fluttering and undulating, trilling and trembling. It’s an attempt to create something with limited resources from a single room.

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