Mari Kvien Brunvoll

With playful and creative interaction and exceptional chemistry, Mari Kvien Brunvoll, Stein Urheim, and Moskus take another step into uncharted musical territory. The result is the album Barefoot in Bryophyte.

With playful and creative interaction and exceptional chemistry, Mari Kvien Brunvoll, Stein Urheim, and Moskus take another step into uncharted musical territory. The result is the album Barefoot in Bryophyte.

It happens only rarely that musicians working with improvisation at the sharp end of experimental practice are so attuned to contemporary style and taste that their work reaches beyond “the serious” or “the popular” to come out the other side sounding like a genuinely new form resonating on both levels simultaneously…

'Animal Imagination' is an extraordinary achievement on many levels, by turns shockingly beautiful, densely allusive and formidably obscure. It marks the return by Espen Sommer Eide to his occasional alias Phonophani, whose self-titled debut was released (on the Biophon label) as long ago as 1998, followed by 'Genetic Engineering' for Rune Grammofon in 2001. "Phonophani seems to cultivate unsettling juxtapositions and seemingly accidental effects in order to take the listener far away from a shiny technological present or sci-fi future into some deep shamanic past or dreamworld…

‘Utopian Tales’ offers strange yet beautiful soundscapes inspired by microtonality – the little gaps between the notes. Just as the rigid divisions of the well-tempered scale in Western music mirrored hierarchical structures in society at large, so microtonal music, which uses intervals smaller than a semi-tone, can be reflective of a freer and more fluid social order…

Things are looking up for Bergen-based Stein Urheim, a musician who, on the basis of Stein Urheim—his second release on Hubro after the vinyl/download-only Kosmolodi (2012) and third as a leader following his 2009 debut, Three Sets of Music—seems interested in just about anything with strings…and a few without…