Jazz
Action Jazz · 7 August 2026
“Desert Ride” runs twelve minutes and seventeen seconds and shows how the album is built. Kjetil Møster opens on tenor over a bass-and-drums bed that never lets up, Hans Magnus Ryan’s guitar takes over and drifts further out of key as it goes, and at the end everything drops away to leave the saxophone alone with Nikolai Hængsle’s bass. They are the most generous twelve minutes on the record and also the ones that get repeated.
“Bolts” is the seventh album by Møster!, the Bergen quartet that carries the saxophonist’s surname. It was cut live over four days at Duper Studio in August 2025, and the man who mixed and mastered it is Jørgen Træen, whom the band calls its fifth member. Ryan and drummer Kenneth Kapstad both play in Motorpsycho, and when the guitar climbs on “Desert Ride” it gets there from that direction: open distortion, not the clean tone of a jazz quartet. The previous album, “Springs”, came out in 2024 on the same label.
“Small Bubbles of Light” (6:38) starts flat out and is the one track where Møster puts down the saxophone for clarinet: the ensemble clears and stays abrasive at the same time. “Not a Signal but a Door” (2:11) is the short piece, a simple melody over Kapstad’s drums, with repeated motifs and silence in between. And “Rippling Circles” (9:09) is a single collective improvisation, with no written theme at the entrance or the exit.
“Desert Ride” and “Bearings” account for twenty-two minutes and forty-eight seconds of the album’s forty minutes and forty-nine, and both follow the same curve: saxophone statement, Ryan’s guitar climbing and coming loose, descent. Placed one at each end, the second time round it no longer surprises. And “Bearings” (10:31) spends ten minutes setting up a resolution that never arrives — a decision, clearly, but one that leaves the record with nowhere to rest.
Action Jazz (AJ016LP), 7 August 2026. Five tracks, 40:49. Kjetil Møster (tenor and baritone saxophones, clarinet, electronics), Hans Magnus Ryan (electric guitar), Nikolai Hængsle (electric bass) and Kenneth Kapstad (drums).
Rating: 7.8/10
Text by Aina Torrents