Eivind Aarset Connected (2004) {jazzland}

While there are still plenty of the signposts that make this an Eivind Aarset album, Sonic Codex represents some significant changes for a Norwegian artist who has become the most important (and in demand) guitarist to emerge from Scandinavia since Terje Rypdal in the early 1970s.

For his fifth album as a leader, Norwegian guitar phenom Eivind Aarset captures the improvisational power and prowess of his expanded Sonic Codex Orchestra. Live Extracts, culled from six different venues over the course of the past year. With minimal editing and no overdubs, this is as close to experiencing Aarset in performance as many will get, and for that reason alone is worthy of attention.....

While the Norwegian jazz scene has been pursuing its own course for decades, the period of 1996-1997 represented a significant watershed, a milestone where an entirely new kind of music emerged, linked to jazz but distanced considerably—some might say completely, but they'd be mistaken—from its roots in the American tradition. Three seminal and groundbreaking albums were released within a year of each other: trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær's Khmer (ECM, 1997); noise improv group Supersilent's 1- 3 (Rune Grammofon, 1997); and, beating the others by a year, keyboardist Bugge Wesseltoft's aptly titled New Conception of Jazz (Jazzland, 1996). All three explored the integration of electronics, disparate cultural references, programming, turntables and—especially in the case of Supersilent, the most avant-garde of the three— noise, to create aural landscapes that were innovative, otherworldly and refreshingly new.