The second release from notable Norwegian jazz musicians Thomas Stronen and Stale Storlokken – who also play in the like-minded jazz ensembles Food and Supersilent – is a wily yet tightly bound set of eight compositions that flaunt a real affinity for the alien and the off-kilter. Most tracks seem to have floated well beyond the realm of gravity, to a place where unexpected colorings and sly shifts in tempo predominate.
There is a spidery swirl to the opening piece, where lurking analogue synth squeals unfurl alongside the contours of Stronen’ bouncy drumming. Everywhere there is a plentiful rustling, a warbling of alien keyboard lines, a clanking of metal drums, a viscosity and texturing of synths that nearly overwhelms with their bristling energy. As a result, on compositions like ‘Grok’, it seems fortuitous to keep up or draw some meaning from the supple, robust synth tones, with the rambling, sporadic drum patterns. Better to simply take some pleasure from the inventiveness of the moves being made. Indeed, ‘moves’ does seem the right word for capturing what is taking place here. These two seem to constantly be fighting, which is to say, playing – each one trying not so much to checkmate the other, but rather to do something unexpected which might displace or disorient their partner.
Rather than placing the emphasis on metrical beat, the various accents of the presentations become the point of focus. The work, then, consists of individual pieces that unwind according to their own internal logic and are more concerned with the evocation of psychological states. Therefore, despite the fact that all of this music gushes from but two players, the effort teems with a wide range of strange sounds. Even as the work grows quieter near the end, these serene tracks still crackle with latent energy. The slow drum machine rhythm and the mid-range electronic scribble of ‘Roo’, for instance, somehow sounds magnified, alert. Over time, the piece begins to crawl towards a more abrasive pace, the disparate particles of sound coalescing into a densely purling, mostly beatless maelstrom of incandescent sound.
That being said, sometimes the duo falls back a bit too easily on birdlike squawks and shooting alien synth zaps. Pieces, though unpredictable, never incur any real revolutions; they simply pass through a series of internal failures, convulsions, and malfunctions. As far as space jazz acts go, however, Stronen and Storlokken are fashioning some of the more intriguing, accessible sounds on the market at the moment.
Max Schaefer
