Jazz
Intakt Records · 28 August 2026
The album opens with a quotation and a blow. On “Yogen”, three oh four, Kaja Draksler hammers the second interval from Ligeti’s “Musica Ricercata II” down in the bass register and then scatters it across two higher piano tracks, while Petter Eldh holds a deliberately blunt four-four ostinato and Christian Lillinger sieves the whole thing with offbeats. The hierarchy of the piano trio is dismantled inside the first minute: the bass is a melodic and a percussive voice at once, and never an anchor for the low end.
On the fourth record they let recognisable forms in so they can contradict them, which the three before it did not do. “Granular Navigation”, four twenty-nine, starts on a genuine uptempo swing, and then cluster chords are laid over it and the bar lengths change every few beats. “När Världens Hopp Förtvinat Stod”, five twenty, is an arrangement of a Swedish hymn from 1589 that dissolves into McCoy Tyner-ish chains of trills without losing its cantilena. And “Mera Punkt”, five fifty-one, leaves a slightly out-of-tune club piano whose repeated notes judder along like a mistracked record.
The flip side of all that precision is that you never know what is hands and what is desk. On “EKV”, two fifty-nine, every single beat triggers an enormous reverb tail that pulls the track towards trip-hop, and Draksler uses timbral and microtonal alterations the back cover makes no mention of: it still says piano, bass and drums. A record that presents itself as an acoustic trio and sounds electronically handled is welcome to do so, but the credits ought to say where each sound comes from, and here neither the band nor Ulrich Stock’s liner notes do.
It runs forty-three minutes across eleven pieces and ends with “Vrt”, two fifty, Slovenian for garden: a music-box theme at an absurd speed that drops the lid after one last chain of trills. Stock reads the title as a compress, “something cushioning a wound”, and that is the one promise the record doesn’t keep. What it does is compress, squeeze and hardly ever let anything breathe. Anyone coming here for consolation will find the opposite.
It was cut on 18 and 19 January 2025 at Bonello Studio in Berlin, with Tobias Ober on the microphones, and it took another nineteen months to appear: Eldh and Lillinger mixed it themselves and Michael Brändli mastered it last May at Hardstudios in Winterthur. That studio time shows, and it is exactly what makes the album both the most approachable of the four and the hardest to decode.
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents