Oker — Husene Våre Er Museer
The instrumentation chosen by this acoustic quartet is guitar, string bass, drums and trumpet. As this album is an exercise in novel sound creation using instruments, I don't always know which instrument is creating the sounds I'm hearing. I'm not sure whether the group is using prepared instrument techniques or simply slapping and scraping their instruments, but there are a great many wooden strikings and rattlings, skin smacking on wood and wood smacking against itself, marbles rolling and strings tugging back into position.
When the band is not engaging in lurching volleys of rattles and percussive thumps, they actually can become quite soothingly melodic with delicate, imperfect arpeggi finger-picked by the guitarist and warm, enveloping bowed drones from Adrian Fiskum Myhr's double bass, actually the band's dominant tonal voice. When he is not creating long tones, he is meandering in plucked harmonic reveries suitable for a meditative ambient recording. The tonalities of these melodic sections are more folk or post rock than jazz. Owing to Myhr's strong presence and the thunderous use of percussion, this album has a great deal more bass frequencies than one would expect from acoustic free improvisation.
The band's restraint is evidenced by the fact that one almost never hears a straightforward 'strum' from the guitar, or an identifiable note from the trumpet. On "Utsyn", I hear the trumpet player's breath but no actual notes, the sustained wet warmth pushed through the instrument amidst the pangs of objects dropped onto the animal skin-like drum heads. The entire album seems focused upon this kind of rickety, dusty, ramshackle assemblage of sounds thrown out for their own sake, almost entirely texturally motivated, with no hint of any meter or beat. The band's grasp of dynamics is subtle and intimate, highlighting the sensitivities of each sound by never rising above mezzo-forte, never startling the listener away with harshness. It certainly helps that the recording quality is pristine.
I find this album beautiful for its wealth of novel acoustic percussion sounds, as well as its unconventional droning melodicism and zen affect. As much as it may be called free jazz, it is also a work of percussion or experimental droning folk. Oker revitalizes this genre with fresh instrumentation and attitudes, and proves that such an album can be pleasurable to hear rather than a work anti-art.