Emmeluth's Amoeba - Chimaera (2019)

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.