Petter Asbjørnsen, Petter Asbjørnsen & Federico Isasti | "Hello Cacus! Happy Thief"

During a residency in New York, September 2018, Argentinian drummer Federico Isasti and Norwegian bassist Petter Asbjørnsen met and developed a spontaneous musical connection. As part of the SIM workshop (led by Ralph Alessi), Petter and Federico played together a wide range of compositions with musicians within different ensemble settings. That initial musical connection and the shared way of conceiving composed music with improvisation as the founding core led to the idea of working together in the future. Just a few days later, fate would have it that they also met the Austrian pianist Petter Asbjørnsen, a musician that Federico and Petter already admired for his work with Jim Black and Nels Cline, among others, and his fresh approach to improvised music. For all these reasons, they decided they would have to record an album before they disappeared to different corners of the world. 

The following days were spent intensively composing and exploring musical concepts and material to play in a piano trio setting. The central pieces of these explorations were a polished work of rhythm and a subtle approach to harmonies. As a result of that work, the musicians arrived at Happy Thief. Both the names of the album and the trio (Hello Cacus!) were chosen after a sour experience. Just a few weeks after the recording, Petter was back in Europe where his personal bag was stolen, containing the hard drive with the original copy of the album’s recording session. Fortunately the recordings were still stored on sound technician Luis Bacqué’s hard-drive in his studio in New Jersey, where the album was recorded. On the one hand, Hello Cacus! references to the fire-breathing roman god Cacus, son of Vulcan, killer of innocents and perpetrator of all kinds of crimes. On the other hand, Happy Thief is a plain citation to that man that almost made this album impossible to be released.