Simon Toldam Trio - Kig Op 15 (2015)

Kig Op 15 (or, Look Up 15) is the second album of an Autumn-Spring duology recorded by the Simon Toldam Trio in a fruitful two-day session in Copenhagen, Denmark. It consists of a dozen Toldam compositions tracked live in the studio to analog tape. Each piece offers a sonic view of what you might see in those rare moments when you stop and look up: lightning bolts, air-light gliders, a crescent moon, spacedrops, treetops, the Big Red Eye ... extraordinary things we often miss in our everyday lives.

The music marks those little eternities when we forget who we are, and does so with a palette of tones and rhythms that take the trio from knotty avant-garde to pensive ballads, from mysterious tinkling to jubilant swings, from the lullabies of a dreamed- of childhood to the timeless here and now.

Drummer Knut Finsrud and bass player Nils Davidsen once again complete this versatile and vibrant trio. Whether parading or drifting, noising or silencing, the interplay between these three displays their uncanny ability to beat and blow as one organism.

The two sessions were overseen by New York agent provacateur Neill Furio, who encouraged an old-school in-studio intensity to distill and document the trio’s wild blue thunder, downtown cool, and haiku-like quietude. Kig Op 15 completes Simon Toldam Trio’s aural essay into the ins and outs of looking up.