Norwegian composer Maja SK Ratkje has immersed herself in various eccentric projects over the years – free improv outfits, performance art installations, a concerto for electric guitar, and even a 2002 album entirely comprised of breaths, gasps, squeaks, grunts, growls and tongue clicks that had been digitally manipulated. Her latest project Sult (Norwegian for “hunger”) was inspired by Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel of the same name and uses music that she initially composed for a Norwegian National Ballet production. To add a further layer of complexity, the entire album is performed on an instrument that she built herself: Ratkje has taken an old-fashioned pump organ, powered by foot pedals, and added PVC tubes, wind machines, bass strings, resin threads and glass percussion – to the point that it now resembles some crazed Heath Robinson contraption.
But the results are quietly compelling. Using her homemade steampunk synthesiser, she’s able to sound like a Bontempi organ, a wheezy accordion, a zither and the percussion section of an orchestra. Her aim was to conjure up the sound of 19th-century Oslo, but the tracks on Sult sometimes nod towards Steve Reich-style organ minimalism (Den spraettende), Ennio Morricone soundtracks (En træflis å tygge på), folksy ballads (Sjå, Åmioda) and breathy, effects-laden folktronica (Et hvitt fyrtårn). Crucially, Ratkje can also write strong, vocal-led songs, such as Sayago and Øine Som Råsilke, that transform this collection from background music into something that stands alone as a compelling album in its own right.
Also out this month
Side projects from two of London’s best known jazz pianists see them moving into the haiku-like world of electronica, minimalism and ambient music. Bill Laurance, best known as a member of the Brooklyn-based jazz-funk collective Snarky Puppy, releases Cables (8 March), while Neil Cowley has teamed up with Ben Lukas Boysen (who runs the Berlin label Erased Tapes) to record Grains & Motes (1 March). Both use simple themes that are repeated like meditations: improvisation is kept to a minimum, drums are largely absent, but ghostly electronic sounds drone and splutter in the background. Laurance touches on electro and R&B but the more compelling tracks – such as HAL, Constance and Cassini – see him rattling through Michael Nyman-ish piano patterns. Cowley – often using what sounds like the soft, sweetly muffled sound of a piano that’s been dampened with layers of felt – seems to have created a more texturally interesting world that will appeal to Nils Frahm fans: tracks like Motes, A Grain of Truth and Ascent sound like slow-motion hymns, working within deliberately constricted melodic phrases but always wringing out a quiet grandeur and a beautiful sadness.
