Swedish guitarist Finn Loxbo here leading his new ensemble Kommun, a four-piece that has made a record called Ephemeralds (FÖNSTRET 4).
I’ve never been sure where to situate Loxbo and his music on the occasions his records appear here since 2018, since sometimes he appears to be coming to it from a jazz or improvisation direction (and with an occasional appearance in a prog-rock duo), but today’s item is clearly a composition by him, as he joins the widespread European movement towards porous, open-ended collaborative performances. To be more precise it’s a directed composition, which most likely relies quite heavily on the input of his three gifted compadres. Indeed the printed credit reads “directions in music by Finn Loxbo”, a phrase which we haven’t read on an album since Miles and Bitches Brew, and the press notes describes his effort as “setting up a situation of intense focus”. In fine, we think the object of his attentions may be a metaphysical proposition, quite nebulous in tone, around which he tiptoes cautiously with measured tread, lest the quarry should awaken. It’s a lot of work for one guitar to carry, so fellow Swedes Lisa Ullén and Vilhelm Bromander provide piano and bass – Ullén is a composer in her own right, and Bromander shone on that unusual Stratosfär record in 2022, another half-jazz composed work that required great concentration. There’s also the American percussionist Ryan Packard, living in Stockholm just now.
What I’m sensing on this single 35:48 min piece is not just the rigid poise and stern brows of the players, but also something about the individual voices of each acoustic instrument; they resolutely remain apart and never blend into a single sound-world of polyphony, sustained chords, or drones. This is apparently quite deliberate; Loxbo may be trying to make some point about the unreliability of our own memories, as he drip-feeds us these tiny shards of musical information that somehow refuse conventional development; nothing quite joins up. If anything’s happening in the world today, it vanishes at the very moment when we perceive it, and nobody’s sure if they saw or heard anything. It’s true that the foursome did start out with an injunction to play something very specific – “tightly stipulated pitch material” is all that we’re told – but the relevant process here is sustaining this tension, this constant barely-moving vista of atomic particles hanging in some imaginary space.
The label is part of the “Festival for Other Music” in Stockholm, dedicated to bringing us radical experimental work like this one, and hoping to change the world, one strand of hair at a time. (28/02/2023)