Jazz
Fluidian Music · 6 March 2026
Fourteen pieces in forty minutes and not one that reaches four and a half: “Windscapes” is built on small scales. Fluidian is the project of Romanian composer and sound artist Emil Gherasim, who plays synths, guitar, piano, electronics and sample-based chamber orchestra here, and the guest is Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær, who appears on six of the fourteen tracks and wrote and played every trumpet part on them.
The titles come in pairs (“Doubt I” and “Doubt II”, the two “Spikes”, the two “Sandshapes”, the two “Consternation”s and the two “Limp Pulses”) and so does the music: slow textures, a pulse with no hard accent, the trumpet entering unhurried over backgrounds Gherasim leaves almost still. He recorded it with Molvær in 2025 and edited, mixed and mastered it himself between 2025 and 2026. “Sandshapes I” and “Sandshapes II” are dedicated to the memory of the composer Ede Terényi, who died in 2020.
The numbers say where the record is: five of the six longest tracks have trumpet on them, and the eight without Molvær all come in under three and a half minutes. Twenty of the forty minutes work as prepared background, and the episodes that stay with you are the ones with the two of them together, “Soulfog – Limp Pulses II” above all, the longest track at four minutes eighteen. It’s the fourth record in Gherasim’s run of collaborations (“Opaque Lights” in 2021 with Arve Henriksen, “Pendular Emotions” in 2023 with Petre Ionuțescu and “Clouds of Wonder” in 2024 with Roland Heidrich), and it can only be bought or heard on Bandcamp: it isn’t on iTunes or Deezer.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents