Jazz
Sleeping Objects · 14 August 2026
On “Dense” Inga Vamze’s tenor saxophone holds a long, fat note while Patrycja Wybrańczyk works underneath it on cymbals, very clean and very close to the microphone. With no piano and no double bass, the album’s harmony is decided by the roughness of the saxophone’s metal and by where each stroke lands: ten improvisations with no net below them.
The title comes from the Polish word akwen, a body of water, with the æ of the Danish and Norwegian alphabets wedged into the middle and the w turned into a v. It is a way of saying the record belongs to all three countries at once. The two met in 2022 at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo; Wybrańczyk lives in Gdańsk and Vamze, who is Latvian, in Copenhagen, which is where they met again to record.
Wybrańczyk is the one with the mileage: some twenty albums, one of the four drummers in Paal Nilssen-Love’s Extra Large Unit (“Steam Waterfall”, NPL Records, 2026), a member of the quartet O.N.E. (“Well, actually…”, April Records, 2025) and the stand-in for Veslemøy Narvesen on Amalie Dahl’s Dafnie’s “Live at Kafé Hærverk” (Trost Records, 2026). She comes from the school of Gard Nilssen and Thomas Strønen and it shows: sharply marked dynamic contrasts with cymbal work that never loses definition.
What limits the album is the programme. The ten titles describe states of the sea’s surface (“Air”, “Dense”, “Quiet”, “Soft and sunny”) and two of them, “Core I” and “Core II”, return to the same material. When the music is this free, that kind of labelling ends up doing the interpretive work the listener should be doing, and there are moments when the title promises more contour than anything that comes out of the speakers.
Sleeping Objects, 14 August 2026. Ten tracks. An eleventh improvisation from those sessions appeared on the Polish drummers’ compilation “Portrety 3” (U Know Me Records, 2026).
Rating: 7.4/10
Text by Aina Torrents