Inge Weatherhead Breistein is yet another ambient jazz practitioner from Norway, I'm not sure what they put in the water up there, but it's certainly chilling out the nation's improvisers, although you should never underestimate the continued influence of Jazzland Recordings - run by Bugge Wesseltoft, which has been forging down(and up)tempo nu-jazz paths since my London jazz heyday in late 90s early 00s.
On his new LP it sounds like Breistein has been spending a lot of time staring up at the stars and wondering what's out there. "Becoming Air", the LP opener, sounds like a deep space cruiser on a tour of neighbouring galaxies; it's huge engines creating a wake of ambient white noise and distant machine throb, as the crackle of interstellar communication systems beam messages to and from the studio. As with all the tracks the saxophone is present, providing a musicality and phrasing that so many ambient albums lack even though on a couple of tracks, this being one, it is hardly distinguishable.
"Canvas of Wonder" opens with some unmistakable sax sounds to reassure those that have seen the press photos that the instrument is being used, although the restrained and sustained notes are ushered into nearby machines to be elongated beyond all expectation, reducing their resistance to melting into the ambient swathes and ambiguous field recordings. Next up "Eroding Mass" leaps back onboard the space cruiser and fires up those throbbing engines again, it's heavy, it's pulsing, it's cinematic and low key dramatic and the sax is once again relegated, this time to a mid-track cameo. This is far from ignorable ambient music.
Next up the LP title track. The space station has docked, Breistein leaves suspended animation grasping his instrument and begins to articulate the disorientation of not just traversing galaxies and year zones, but experiencing a new reality, by thinning the soundscape, adding some earthly instrumentation and cosmic sparkle over some distant thuds as the ship drops its low gravity anchors. Next up he sets out to "Defy Tranquility" but does just the opposite instead creating some form of astral jazz hop that will surely find a home in all sorts of late night smoking dens.
The LP closes with "A Lucid Moment" where he is seemingly gazing out of a window at the wonders of deep space whilst trying to convey the joys of transcending his previously limited reality tunnel and the universal connections he now understands.
The album is all sorts of ambient jazz shades and I highly recommend you beam aboard.
Playlist Companion
You can find Breistein and other great tunes from the independent jazz underground in the Slow Jazz Playlist.
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