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<\/figure>\nDear Fellow Listeners,<\/strong><\/p>\n The old\u00a0Listening Post<\/strong>\u00a0feature of This Week in Sound<\/a> has been renamed\u00a0Throughline<\/strong>\u00a0to better represent the underlying concept. The concept is an annotated three-item music playlist\/mixtape, each entry centered on a different theme, that theme being the \u201cthrough line\u201d between the varied tracks.<\/p>\n What constitutes a through line?<\/strong>\u00a0It might be instrumentation (as in this issue), or technique, or cultural heritage, or record label, or scene, or medium, or mode of consumption, or collaborative connection, or generational influence, or something else entirely. The tracks may be new or old, live or studio, original or reworked, official or unofficial. Usually there will be at least one recent (or otherwise timely) track in order to keep the loose associations tethered to our current moment. This week they\u2019re all new.<\/p>\n If the This Week in Sound newsletter is about the role of sound in culture and everyday life, then the Throughline issues, by highlighting the shared context of various tracks, surface such concepts through clusters of mutual association. (Similarly, by connecting the dots within a given issue\u2019s selections, I\u2019m aiming to connect the dots between Throughline and the sound studies material that constitutes This Week in Sound.)<\/p>\n The plan is for these Throughlines issues to go to paid This Week in Sound subscribers as a thank-you, but as I haven\u2019t sent out one of these recommended listening sets in a while, this issue goes out to the full subscriber list. There are currently well over 5,000 This Week in Sound subscribers, which is awesome. I can\u2019t promise the Throughlines annotations will always be as lengthy, meaty, and link-filled as this week\u2019s, but the themes and sets will always reflect consideration.<\/p>\n The first of these new Throughline entries is titled \u201cValve Proposition\u201d \u2014\u00a0yeah, a brass-themed play on the idea of \u201cvalue proposition,\u201d which was on my mind as I\u2019ve been adjusting my overall approach to my newsletter in this age of newsletter overload (and, not unrelated: machine-induced slop). This issue situates side-by-side the work of three very different exploratory trumpet players. Below are videos of two live performances, plus one album track. Thanks for listening and reading. As always, your feedback, recommendations, and support are appreciated.<\/p>\n If you read my long-running blog,\u00a0Disquiet.com<\/a>, then you may have seen a mention of this video\u00a0earlier this week<\/a>, when I listed it in the\u00a0On Repeat<\/a>\u00a0section, where most Sundays I mention some music I\u2019m especially fond of at the moment, and that I don\u2019t want to risk waiting to write about. This footage is of a quartet featuring the extraordinary Norwegian electric guitarist\u00a0Eivind Aarset<\/strong>. Like a lot of his listeners, I first encountered Aarset\u2019s heavily processed playing as a result of his partnership in the band led by trumpeter Nils Petter Molv\u00e6r. If I understand correctly, the quartet here \u2014 Aarset,\u00a0Jan Bang<\/strong>\u00a0(live sampling, electronics),\u00a0Ingar Zach<\/strong>\u00a0(percussion), and\u00a0Max Kraft<\/strong>\u00a0(trumpet) \u2014 is essentially the After the Wildfire Quartet, with Kraft in the place of the great Arve Henriksen. This is fantastic music, with subtle rhythms and sublime, restrained playing by both Aarset and Kraft. This video is the first I\u2019ve heard Kraft, and it\u2019s rewarding to listen to this back to back with some of After the Wildfire\u2019s work. After the Wildfire is its own complicated and rich subject, having arisen from\u00a0a collaboration<\/a>\u00a0between Bang and Henriksen (along with Dzijan Emin, who conducted the Fames Institute Orchestra from North Macedonia). Given that this edition of Throughlines is the first in the new series, I couldn\u2019t have hoped for a better example of a through line than\u00a0this video<\/a>\u00a0(recorded at the G\u0103r\u00e2na JazzFest in Romania back in July), since this is a new(ish?) quartet born from a preceding sequence of projects. And who knows where it will go, and when those various phases may circle back around.<\/p>\n \n\u25b0 1: FOUR-TIFIED: Max Kraft Takes a Chair<\/strong><\/h2>\n