Akmee are a Norwegian fourtet who have been fired up by a group love of improv jazz, contempo classicism and the odd sprinkling of indigenous sacred music(s) ever since their formation back in the late twenty-tens. Nailing those particular genres to the band’s mast unavoidably shunts things towards a Jan Garbareked default setting, which is not always such an enticing prospect. However, in this case, Akmee’s profile holds up particularly well with their follow-up to 2018’s Neptun c.d. Their inventiveness and good grasp of light and shade are more than enough to separate them from those coming from a more sedate/coffee tabled grounding. The sleeve art, where Latin titles meet gothic calligraphy seems to be a telling opening gambit.

Bandmembers Erik Kimestad Pedersen (trumpet), pianist Kjetil Jerve and the rhythm section of bassist Erland Olderskog and Andreas Wildhagen (drums/percussion) would appear to be highly regarded/upper echelon players in and around the Scandinavian triangle. To such a degree that their affiliations with other projects have now become far too numerous to detail. With their dance cards fully marked, all of the recording duties were wrapped up at an Oslo church within the space of one single day. The lure of favourable acoustics and a resident grand piano proving far too great.

No doubt a nod of the head, a raised eyebrow or one of those Miles Davis-styled karate chop moves would be more than enough of a cue from a group member to transform band think in a Norway minute. Like “Zolty” for example, where a sassy opening horn blare melts into a number of cascading piano trills and petulant drum backchat. Or, maybe “Winieta” or “Rozpacz” where the scuttling, shadow-hugging piano lines cross continents and transport the listener to a film noir set in a 1950’s New York tenement. Whichever way you odds it – Sacrum… undoubtedly shows Akmee’s precision, versatility and flexible approach working to full effect.

“Freedom! You are welcome to listen, come to a concert or fuck off – as you please! The quartet wishes you the best anyways…” I’m with you boys! Honest! Hopefully some of that piss’n’vinegar (coming from the accompanying cribsheet), will worm its way into your next release, due in 2026 or thereabouts (?).

Also available in l.p. format

Together, this pair have put together scrape and saw to realise The Noise Is Rest (CONRAD SOUND CNRD328CD), which on early outings I could enthusiastically regard as a tiny masterpiece in its studied realm of cloudery and vibrational aspect. This doesn’t appear to be conventional improvised or composed music, and instead the performers seem bent on pushing themselves to one extreme or another, in terms of sounds made and spiritual / intellectual states attained. There’s a certain courage in surrendering to a sound and letting the force lead you by the long hairs to wherever it may traipse, seeking whom it would devour. Part of this “extreme” intrepid explorer approach is naturally down to the selection of instruments – not your standard cigar-boxes. Ole-Henrk plays something called the piccoletto-violin, evidently a specialist instrument that enables the production of very high frequencies, but in a way that the normal violin cannot manage. They somehow come out much more clearly. As to Guro Skumsnes Moe, she plays the octabass, which is about the most extreme form of contrabass known to man. Apparently only seven of these devils are in existence in the known musical world, and for some reason it never really took off with composers or musicians ever since it was first built in the mid-19th century by some French loon. Perhaps the extreme difficulty of playing this beast, which can grow to a height of nearly 12 feet, might account for this lack of engagement. You have to play it with pedals and levers rather than the conventional manner.

Well, I’ve just spent 155 words telling you what is plainly obvious if you simply look at the cover photograph. This may look as poised and mannered as a still from a movie by Wes Anderson, but it’s the real deal. As to the incredible music and incredible sounds, there’s considerable variety on offer here, though I’ll award the golden mille-feuille to ‘Blackout Lighthouse’, 7:11 mins of desolate starkness that you could use to bleach the wallpaper and still have enough left over to wrap a dead fish. However, the entire album is fabulously great with nary a duff moment across eight highly evocative tracks of minimal landscape painting and meditational non-drone, with textures as edible as raspberry-flavoured sandpaper and discordant anti-harmonics arising at every turn, sufficient to rotate the weather-vane through 90 degrees. It’s not inept, I think, to compare the sound they make to that of the ocean or the wind on a deserted Nordic island. The sound just transports you to this lovely remote spot and allows you freedom to think, breath, stretch out. Very recommended. From 2nd August 2019.

This strategy has provided Streifenjunko with something not unlike a pre-programmed road map to follow as they puff their slow, simple notes; they liken the process to driving a car, hence the title. They also seem to relish the possibility of unexpected changes in the flow, so perhaps this self-generating software (if indeed that’s what it is) almost has a mind of its own, contributing passages of ever-renewing surprise in a halting manner. If we are expected to apply the driving metaphor as we appraise this, then ‘Everything We Touch Is Electric’ is about the slowest crawl I’ve ever hitched – even the bus inching its way over Waterloo Road in heavy traffic does better. However, despite the pedantic deliberation of the playing, the air still crackles with a certain tension, like that of strangers uncertain what to say to each other; and the combined instruments sound like a souped-up harmonium with three feet pumping the bellows. If they wanted to combine this software of theirs with a sat-nav box, I don’t expect it would sell too well, but at least the driver would arrive in a serene state of mind.

Which brings us to ‘Astronaut Peace’, where there’s hardly any stop-starting at all, and what emerges is like a flabbier version of a Yoshi Wada drone. And yet, even these shifting planes of brass and woodwind tones contain a certain eerie fascination, almost transparent in hue. Probably we are supposed to feel like a weightless astronaut floating round his tin can; it certainly isn’t much of a “driver”. An even lusher set of drones can be found on ‘Like Driving’, the 19 min title track, and here we’re getting back to the switcheroo element which is intervening in the smooth music-making process like a well-meaning hardware store owner, offering you tools of various sizes until you find the one that fits.

Perhaps “intervening” is too strong a word for these rather mild changes that are taking place; it’s certainly not as crazy or wild as a John Zorn game piece, for instance. Instead, it’s a bit like turning switches or applying dampers / diapasons on an organ manual. The changes are largely being wrought on the tone and pitch, rather than determining the direction of the music very much. No wonder the players sound so relaxed; it’s like a game of dodgem cars happening very slowly, in vehicles made of foam rubber. From 12th October 2018.

While I’m still not ready to accept the tags of “noise, prog, blues, ambient jazz and psych” which KFJC ascribe to this music – the simple use of a phase filter doesn’t make it “psychedelic” – I can appreciate the compression, the miniaturisation process which seems to be the blueprint for their every move, as if they intend to rethink the history of music as a series of small ceramic decorative objects to fit in a tiny Tokyo apartment. I’m therefore prepared to retract my earlier sentiment that Golden Oriole are “heavy-handed”, along with other unkind epithets such as “lumbering ox-like fellows”. Nothing much is added to the overall argument by hearing the second track, but there’s more chaos on offer this time; the rhythm section are locked together for sure, yet somehow pulling in different directions at once, and an odd spastic energy is released thereby. There is also more boldness in the top layers – I hesitate to call them “guitar solos” – which are like explosions of firework-colour noise illuminating the strange underpinning rhythm.

Not half bad at all. If these crazy Norwegians ever met up with Lightning Bolt in the room, it would be like two opposing forces in physics clashing in the fourth dimension, and we’d all turn into photographic negatives of ourselves. Also available on vinyl from Mozart Kebab. From 23rd July 2018.

On the B side, Skadne Krek branch out into more exploratory and experimental turf over two long tracks… ‘Savage Boner’ (a wilfully vulgar title) is the only track here to feature vocals, such as they are, since Gaute mostly just shouts and grunts and chants incomprehensibly, but few can ignore this clarion call as he rouses the troops to action as effectively as a heavy-set sergeant-major. The latter half of this tune develops into a freaky instrumental that’s almost psychedelic in its reach, and its very strong dynamic reminded me of ‘Paper Hats’ by This Heat (though one should be careful making such comparisons). ‘Gurn Perm’ is also lengthy, about as “noodly” as these angsty players get, producing the sort of repetitive music that’s bound to draw “Krautrock” labels from admiring listeners.

Don’t let the “restrained” cover – a photo by Jorgen Tjemsland – deceive you into mistaking this for some slab of experimental electronic drone, as it’s packed with powerful jolts which can galvanise your damaged tendons. I see their first LP came out in 2013 – don’t know how we missed that one – but it has more suitable cover art, a colourful drawing of a mad rabbit crashing upstairs in a building at top speed. From 8 May 2018.

Secondly, they have this “airy” texture to each piece, plenty of space as it were hanging between the notes, such that the listener almost feels they could insert themselves into the playback as easily as a butterfly in a room full of soap bubbles. But the bubbles keep moving and changing. Maybe this is what the world of the sub-atomic structure will look like, when science finally finds a way to shrink the human race to the size of a proton or quark. Oker create pleasing blends, apparently based more on surface textures and effects (especially percussive effects) than on actual distinct musical notes. This does sometimes result in rather vapid “mood” music at times, but it can also create subtle but strong tensions and dynamic shapes.

The four players are Adrian Fiskum Myhr, Jan Martin Gismervik, Torstein Lavik Larsen and Fredrik Rasten. They all play or have played in a ton and a half of contemporary Norwegian bands, some of them straddling rock and jazz, and only a few of the names of these are familiar to me – e.g. Monkey Plot, Wolfram Trio, and Skadedyr. Evidence once again of the fertile music activity in Norway just now. From 19th January 2018.

There’s also Einar Selvik’s Wardruna project which should be taken into account; we noted their Runaljod – Ragnarok album in 2017, and its preoccupation with ancient Nordic topics has seeped well into the grooves of Gleipners Smeder. “The concept…is strongly founded in the old Norse cults and beliefs”, the press note informs us, while taking us on a whistle-stop tour through some highlights of Norse creation myths (hello, Ragnarok) and reminding us that the lyrics here are sung in old Norse as well as modern Norwegian. What mostly comes over on today’s spin is an epic, near-heroic sense of drama and moment, every track overloaded with incident in the guitars, drumming, and singing, performances which have passed beyond merely “frantic” into some new unexplored realm of urgency. Only the second track, ‘Svartalvheims Djup’, offers some relief from this intensity, but it’s still a gloomy exploration of a frozen waste, whose mountain slopes are evidently inhabited by unpleasant creatures we don’t wish to encounter.

Kvitrafn’s production skills are exceptional, bringing depth and detail to every waking moment of the album; it’s very far from being a basic BM thrash of nasty guitars, in spite of Jotunspor’s evident commitment to the “grim and primitive” schools of Black Metal. There’s a lot of attention paid to processing, judicious use of effects, stacked vocals, even sound effects; the album tells a story, and the story-tellers stick to the theme with tenacity and conviction, bordering on the fanatical. From 23 November 2017.

Here on Juxtaposition though she’s in full attack mode, turning her interiority inside-out, leading the trio of hunters like a cross between Boadicea and Joan Of Arc, letting the full range of emotions sprawl forth through the action-painting stylings of her painterly shouts and splurgy yelps. Without doubt, famed Japanese shrieker Junko (who has often done it in small venues with Michel Henritzi) now has a pretender to her throne lurking in the flanks of the courtroom. Meanwhile the two Norwegian manly hunks o’talent pour forth angry metallic bursts and clanks, in a manner that verges on the obnoxious. These are Magnus Skavhaug Nergaard, who has also played his bass in Ich Bin Nintendo and Monkey Plot, here going “electric” with a vengeance and also letting rip with electronics and field recordings; and Utku Tavil, the drummer who sometimes performs as Beeatsz and whose Brain Pussyfication site is a marvellous active survey of the pulsebeat of underground Norway just now.

We mustn’t overlook Natali Abrahamsen Garner, the second vocalist who is showcased on the Propan album for Va Fongool (which looks majorly cool by the way, and I wish we had a copy of that for comparison), who is on good screechy form throughout, adding punky day-glo colours to the Jackson Pollock canvas of noise. When you remove all the modifiers from the printed credits, this is pretty much a drum and bass noise record with two madcap vocalists on top; what could be better than that? It’s an overpowering listen, but also energising…will give you as much of a sugar rush as the fruit salad that is photographed on the inner gaterfold, and is about as chaotic in structural terms as the fruit salad is in culinary terms…if that makes any sense. Great! From 25 September 2017, this one should be shouting “buy me” to all readers who know what’s good for them.

They’ve been doing the Akmee thing since 2013, and their secret weapon is the trumpeter Erik Kimestad Pedersen, a player who doesn’t say very much on his horn but when he does, every note rings true and hits the target. The target in this case is the sort of mysterious and introspective emotional range which I wish more jazz musicians would have a crack at expressing; hard to pin down such a personal and evanescent thing, but my favourite examples of it can be found on the ESP’-Disk label and include the New York Art Quintet record and parts of In Search Of The Mystery by Gato Barbieri. Perhaps also some moments on The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra. Miles used to capture it on some of the ballads during his “cool” period, but even he went a bit slushy in later periods, such as the interminable mush of ‘He Loved Him Madly’. Akmee will soon be filed away in this highly subjective schema of mine.

They succeed best on the tracks ‘Summoning’ and ‘Tides In Space’, both of which have a down-beat and wistful tone, and the music is filled with exciting gaps and spaces. To put it another way, the quartet don’t feel the need to “blow” or “cook” with every waking moment. All the players contribute equally to the group sound and the process, they all arrive at the session with compositions and scored parts, but then allow themselves to depart from the written page so that “parts…float between the different instruments”. They seem to be very attuned to their shared collective energy, not getting in each other’s way. The music breathes a sigh of relief, unencumbered by massive human egos, and finds its natural course with the ease of a river.

We could mention the vague outer-space touches in titles like Neptun, ‘Tides In Space’ and ‘Wavelengths’, but we’ve already name-checked Sun Ra. And I realise they are a collective, but the pianist Kjetil Jerve remains the star for me; the rapid changes (styles, melodies, techniques, genres…) he’s capable of enacting within these tunes are amazing to me, indicating a high degree of fluency and assurance. A hugely enjoyable record, bright and brilliant in its execution. From 21 July 2017.