(Hubro, Avant-Garde Jazz, Chamber, Free Improvisation) [WEB] 1982 - A/B - 2014, FLAC (tracks), lossless

The improvisational trio 1982 consists of Nils Økland, Sigbjørn Apeland and Øyvind Skarbø. The trio has already released three critically acclaimed albums. On their previous album the musicians collaborated with pedal steel legend BJ Cole. This time they have invited wind players Fredrik Ljungkvist (Atomic), Erik Johannessen (Jaga Jazzist), Sofya Dudaeva, Hanne Liland Rekdal, Matthias Wallin and Stian Omenås (Stian Omenås Klangkammer) to participate in an unusual collaboration. As the title of the trio’s fourth album, A/B, indicates, it is divided into two parts. The album is built up with the classic LP structure of an A side and a B side, with a long piece, 18:16 minutes, filling the entire A side. This piece clearly stands out as the most distinctive in 1982’s discography up to now. Taking his point of departure in improvisations recorded by the trio, trumpeter and composer Stian Omenås has “expanded on” the idiom and has composed and arranged music for a wind sextet that has been layered on top of the original improvisation. Drummer Øyvind Skarbø got the idea for this unusual project together with Tobias and Henrik, the sons of Sigbjørn and Nils, respectively, after a concert in Haugesund. Stian Omenås was quickly pulled into the project. Øyvind and Stian have been playing together since their early teens, and Omenås is a superb improviser and composer as well as a highly educated conductor. “He was simply the perfect man for the job,” says Skarbø. “The fact that we communicate as well as we do has also made the process much easier.” On the B side we once again hear 1982 in the form of a trio, with several new ideas that serve to enlarge the 1982 universe. Sigbjørn plays piano on one track, and Nils Økland sings. “Our goal is to continue to develop things further, and I feel that we’re managing to do just that,” says Skarbø. The musicians of 1982 are improvisers to their very marrow, and everyone who has seen and heard them in concert knows that they love to surprise their audiences. The recordings of 1982 were made at Grieghallen Studio in Bergen just before the studio was closed down in the summer of 2013. The wind sextet was recorded at Rainbow Studio in Oslo with technician Jan Erik Kongshaug. Recently 1982 has also made a recording, not yet finished, with a fourth person. The group will participate in a live project related to animated film, and will compose a commissioned work for NOTAM (the Norwegian Center for Technology in Music and the Arts). The members of the group have also begun thinking about yet another recording project to be completed for the trio’s 10th anniversary in 2017.

It’s a dramatic hot air balloon flight, and the brass and woodwind sidle past me like wispy, cotton wall condensation, playfully nudging the yaw of my drift in grand chicanes across the skyline. Tiny breaths and clunking buttons sound like the vintage creaks of my wooden basket, or the ropes and leavers knocking against the framework – it’s an idyllic and colour-saturated opening, and perhaps it’s my own fault for being so blissfully oblivious to the streaks of grey thickening across the cloud perimeters. In the absence of any rhythm to cling onto, I float into the dissonance that curdles surreptitiously into being like an unforecast summer storm, as violins turn from glossy ribbons into sharp fizzles of lightning; just as I feel helplessly swallowed up by the atmosphere that tilts from light into dark (and eventually back again), the players on A/B tumble into the black as though unable to stop themselves, puppeteered by a momentum that becomes increasingly vigorous.
With a few smacks of tom drum I slam back onto the earth, and the record’s motion mutates from a ceaseless glide to an arduous, aimless pilgrimage on foot for the second half. The melodies feel stranded, like palms facing upward waiting for purpose to fall into them; each track hoists itself forward with a sturdy determination, fixated on a horizon that rolls over and over again in eternally renewed mystique. Voices croak and groan in a tug of momentary, woozy fatigue under sunset, while the clunk of changing pitch becomes laboured and somewhat unsettled, like a gigantic wooden marionette fidgeting during sleep. I don’t end my journey through A/B cradled in the arms of resolve, and as harmonium throbs beneath a snare drum that quivers like butterfly wings, I’m left miles from whence I came and no closer to understanding where I’m heading – the major key that carries me out feels like an empty optimistic remark, like an “it’s okay” spoken to someone whose longing and disconcertion runs unfathomably deep.