Jazz Sunday: HULLVANN: Bestof, Tellef Øgrim: Brain Sofa
Let's go to Norway first, and for some time I've had the desire to listen to the music made and performed by the distinguished guitarist from Oslo, Tellef Øgrim , who I think I've already mentioned several times this year as a frequent collaborator of other Scandinavian musicians I've written about. He has now given me an excellent guide, publishing two new, interesting editions at the beginning of December. Øgrim, of course, like a large part of his free improv brothers and sisters, records and publishes a lot of music and in fact one of these two releases is a compilation of the best moments from several recent albums (released in 2023 and 2024) that he worked on in a particular line-up, performing live and improvising in studio conditions, and where the difference in approach, but also in sound quality, is almost imperceptible. These are all pure, unadulterated free improvisations in which the remnants of idiomatic music are barely visible and the musicians programmatically go against the creation of harmony, themes, grooves..
So let's listen to that compilation first: HULLVANN is the name of the band and Bestof has an album, and this is a line-up in which, in addition to Øgrim on the electric guitar, drummer Thomas Oxem, bassist Anders Berg and saxophonist Dario Fariello play (not necessarily ALWAYS at the same time). On some albums, Fariella is signed to use his voice (this can be heard here already on the first composition) and play the "feedback viola" which PROBABLY means that he plays the electric viola but in such a way that it goes into the speaker and causes microphonics while playing. A noble work, a human effort to give music the freedom with which it then chooses what to do.
On the mentioned four albums, this band is sometimes reduced to three, sometimes there is no Pharrell and sometimes there is no Oxem, but since we are talking about completely non-hierarchical music in which there is no division between accompaniment and soloists, then those mutations in the line-up do not particularly reflect much on what is heard.
Tellef Øgrim is otherwise an old guard of Scandinavian free improvisation, born in 1958 and with rock and jazz bands during his youth, and in the early eighties he tasted a measure of mainstream popularity with the new wave group Ung Pike Forsvunnet, which had a couple of releases and appearances on television. AND THAT MEANED SOMETHING THEN. In 1985, he had the soul-rock band Duck Spin with his later wife, and in 1987 he founded his first jazz group, Libido. Then he started writing music for the theater, and progressively became more and more interested in free improvisation and then, especially in this century, collaborated with many European musicians from this scene, including, for example, people like Jacek Kochan, Anne Danielsen, Franz Hautzinger... He also had multimedia projects, and around 2017 his trio with the Swedes, Anders Berg on bass and Peeter Uuskyla on drums, has been quite active.
I already wrote about Uuskyla, and also about Berg, earlier this year, so please refer to it . And here we will add that Thomas Oxen is a Norwegian drummer and sound engineer who collaborates a lot with strong names such as e.g. Fred Longberg-Holm, Paal Nilssen-Love, but also Ken Vandermark. As a musician, he had collaborations with various Scandinavian musicians (eg Lasse Marhaug) and the most important to me is the band Bladed, which performs some kind of independent, arty rock/pop.
Dario Fariello is the youngest of this team, born in Naples in 1987 and currently living in Berlin. He has been involved in improvised music since he was young (particularly while studying in Bologna where he started the Bologna Improvisers Orchestra as well as the Eclectic Polpo Records label). He has played with various good characters such as Gino Robair, Eugene Chadbourne, Jonas Kocher, Renato Ciunfrini and in general the man does various interesting things.
But, of course, Bestof is by nature a record only for the hardest core of free improv fans, but also because even though this is Øgrim's selection of the "best" HULLVANN pieces from the last couple of years, we are talking about music whose authors make a strong effort to be completely free, without any debt to genre and idiomatic expressions. In other words, when you hear something reminiscent of a funky groove or a jazzy swing here, they are rare concessions to "regular" music, and more often than not they are just islets of the idiomatic in a sea of completely free sounds.
Øgrim plays electric guitar here, but his chosen sound is relatively dry, without many of the effects that improv guitarists like today. Here, therefore, there is no big playing with the volume pedal, or digital sampling and signal processing, and Øgrim's playing is primarily based on finding meaningful handfuls of notes and sounds and their meaningful connection, sometimes through harmonies, often without harmonies, with a strong, energetic but disciplined sound. The interactions, when there are any, are most noticeable with Fariello's sax and the two musicians occasionally have clear exchanges and joint passages through the scales.
However, HULLVANN's music is more of a space where four people find their own autonomous zone than some kind of disciplined directed joint venture, so here everyone stops and starts when they want, Oxem plays some of his own polyrhythms, Berg thunders from the underground and the other two sputter, squeal, screech and bark and it all sounds as if it was recorded on a phone from the audience.
But, if you like that particular aesthetic, HULLVANN offers a hardcore program and, as we said, in some compositions we also get a kind of groove. And in others, we simply enjoy the sound that splits, breaks, melts - listen for example to Øgrim's guitar in Hard Starboard, where the strings vibrate as if some punk got hold of Hendrix's guitar and now HE is making love to it. Elsewhere, for example in the Cyclic poem, the guitarist seeks expression in small, cut-off gestures from which an almost rock'n'roll expression grows.
https://tellefogrim.bandcamp.com/album/bestof
Øgrim's second release from December is the Brain Sofa EP, on which he plays solo, acoustic guitar. And not just any acoustic guitar, but a very important acoustic guitar for him, which he bought at a pawn shop about forty years ago, after the poor guitar, bought as a gift and broken at a party, was brought to the shop to be fixed and then no one ever came to pick it up.
In the solo release, Øgrim manages like a fish in water, playing mostly very cerebral but actually warm, emotional micro-themes and dulcet chords, offering a dynamic and intimate program of short compositions that show that amplification, effects, electricity are not necessary for richness of sound and avant-garde abstraction - nothing but a classical instrument and a liberated musician:
https://tellefogrim.bandcamp.com/album/brain-sofa
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