Emmeluth's Amoeba
CHIMAERA
POLYP is Emmeluths Amoeba's SEcond album.
release: november 15 2019.
Following on from "Polyp", Emmeluth's Amoeba takes their unique cracked looking-glass approach to improvisation to new heights and deeper depths.
Highly angular compositions that send branches through four dimensions act as a scaffolding for their layered counterpoints and intermittent bursts of unison and harmonic playing. Tonal instruments create rhythmical figures that knit the pieces together, while the percussion engages in free discourse. Prolonged sax shrieks, anti-guitar techniques, polyrhythmic drumming, muted piano or occasional squabbling synthlines accrue alongside other extending playing techniques in an endless search and discovery of new sounds to juxtapose with those more readily associated with "jazz". Yet even those typically "jazz" sounds are repurposed, given new roles more at home in avant garde chamber orchestras.
Disjointed atmospherics can suddenly give way under the sudden eruption of a soundtrack to a near unimaginable collaboration between Tex Avery and David Lynch. Electro-acoustic glitching can skitter across the soundscape only to become a fanfare for an extra-terrestrial apocalypse (and take a sharp about turn back again). Atonal chords chime like bells through atmospheres dense with heavy gases, almost warbling and warping and detuning as they tail off into the distance. Chattering percussion skitters between complex interplays of furious chordal piano and unison sax and guitar. The music feels like an organic lifeform with its own consciousness, moving and breathing, shifting shapes and colours at will, assimilating everything from hard core free jazz to traditional jazz ballads and combining it with its own unique DNA.
While the album begins and ends with Signe Emmeluth's lone saxophone, her authority here is as much about knowing when to step back to allow exposition of the group dynamics and to display the individualism of Ole Mofjell's drumming, Karl Bjorå's guitar and Christian Balvig's piano. The result is an interlinked series of thematically connected miniatures in each piece, with each musician exploring the same concepts from different angles and presenting their findings with supreme eloquence.
Musicians:
Signe Emmeluth - alto saxophone / compositions
Christian Balvig - piano
Ole Mofjell - drums
Karl Bjorå - guitar
“Bjorå lets his fingers fly, Balvig rumbles and beats, Mofjell rages, Emmeluth tiroliert in high and highest tones, à la Rasmussen and the tramps, as with Rosencrantz and dandelions. The title track leads with ghost piano and translucent noises to the extreme sea, trailing feet shudder, nimble Thumbelina strumming ‘Circular Movements”
“The music carries with it echoes of greats like Albert Ayler and Peter Brötzmann. Emmeluth seamlessly steers the band from uncompromising free jazz in one moment, to more strident jazz in the next. It sounds very tough!”
““Chimaera ”is experienced as a fusion between contemporary musical movements and modern jazz”
“Emmeluth leads the dances of a surreptitious provocation jazz, where structures that suggest circularity, angles or segmentations, are the object of a representation that is not afraid to challenge what passes for the emotionality of music.”
“Chimaera is the newest release from the group, and boy what a ride it is! All members of Amoeba truly have one of a kind synergistic relationship, and it makes for some high quality results! ”
“Signe has grown considerably as a musician and composer in a few years, and exhibits an exploratory authority and openness to ideas. Much of the music this quartet creates is fairly advanced in form, but intuitively catchy for it”
“Followers of Traditional, Free and Avantgarde Jazz, yet going well beyond confining genre borders to provide highly detailed, complex and thought out compositions often somewhat by dramatic, hammering piano stakkatos and resulting sonic thunder”
PRODUCTION // OF 149
Recorded in Øra Studio (Trondheim, NO) February 2019 by Karl Klaseie
Mixed and mastered by Karl Klaseie in Øra Mastering (Trondheim, NO)
Cover art by Natali Abrahamsen Garner & Magnus Skavhaug Nergaard
Inner photo by Laurent Orseau