MOON RELAY - IMI

Curious but logical: when they want to let off steam, rock musicians throw themselves into improvisation, typically the jam session, whereas experimenters tend to fall back on the safety of pop-rock structures. It is not an absolute rule, but it seems to hold true in the case of the uncompromising Norwegian guitarist Håvard Volden and his fellow adventurers in Moon Relay: despite coming from all sorts of musical backgrounds, Daniel Meyer Grønvold, Ola Høyer and Christian Næss also belong to the hybrid galaxy of the North European jazz avant-garde, while the quartet as a whole embraces an interplay that is as schematic as it is playful.

Back on the trusty Hubro after the self-titled mini-album (2013) and “Full Stop Etc.” (2016), with the present “IMI” the Scandinavian band continues to feed its series of eclectic musical episodes, with unpronounceable ASCII-character titles. If the opening riff drags along echoes of dub, the second track, driven by a stunning drum machine, could easily be mistaken for one of the recent electro-trash incursions of $hit & $hine; and then there are suave, upscale-cocktail-hour grooves mixed with the acidity of electric guitar (“___§”), further minimal-techno solipsisms disturbed by crackling digital modifications (“–#/#^”), and a final, hypnotic motorik gallop with the tension of a restless metropolitan nocturne.

Craft and enthusiasm are not lacking, and the stylistic mélange is elastic enough to keep the listener's interest alive throughout. Nevertheless, Moon Relay's acid test suffers from a syndrome shared by much of the Hubro catalogue: once the piece is added to the complex map of the Norwegian experimental scene, it gets lost within the mosaic, leaving behind no more than a dot, however functional to the ongoing affirmation of a cultural climate whose vitality has no equal in Europe.

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27/10/2018