OKER - Husene våre er museer

“Our houses are museums”: I've turned this title over at length, trying to work out its relationship with the music of the newborn Norwegian ensemble Oker, released as usual by Ingar Zach's label Sofa (Ingar Zach). At first I took it for a subtly ironic remark, a way of likening ordinary homes to collections of curious figures and objects, perhaps a little outdated, interesting only up to a point. Then I finally understood (or so I think): houses are indeed places of preservation, still and furnished, while it is out there, in nature, that a constant renewal takes place, a perpetual revolution between biological life and death.

In other words, once again a chamber formation has emerged from Scandinavian soil, one that sidesteps any reference to European or transatlantic classicisms, immersed as it is in a spontaneous mimicry of the acoustic phenomena of a parallel ecosystem, reimagined with sensitivity through the timbral properties, we might almost say the "phonetics", of each instrument.

It is undeniable that here, too, music becomes essentially language: an unintelligible yet equally intriguing speech, since any idiom unknown to us sounds like a foreign melody, a fluid verbal composition sustained by its own rules and specific sonorities.

The wordless dialogue of this latest unusual Nordic unplugged quartet resembles a gathering of various forest animal species, creatures whose taxonomy remains uncertain and to whom distinctive calls would be hard to assign. Wherever your imagination takes you, the most evident aspect of these spontaneous para-harmonies is the overflowing richness of sonic solutions, enough to make you believe in a lineup far larger than a simple quartet.

Occasional tonal openings are not lacking, brief breaths taken from an obstinate hermeticism, but the most gripping passages remain undoubtedly those that mock the stylistic devices and techniques of academic heritage: guitar (Fredrik Rasten) and double bass (Adrian Fiskum Myhr) are bowed without a trace of melody, like the rustling of the ground under the feather-light weight of small mammals; Jan Martin Gismervik's drums are muffled under a layer of felt, or tapped in an ornithological manner; Torstein Lavik Larsen's trumpet is pure punctuation, a faint Morse code that never reveals the brassy identity of the instrument.

It is impossible to keep rational track of the constant back and forth between naturalism and abstraction, unorthodox neoclassicism and free improvisation, categories hybridized once again with such vibrant immediacy that they increasingly establish the Sofa label as a genre in its own right, too curious and innovative to remain a mere local pride. With diligent humility, the Norwegian scene keeps itself at the forefront of the European acoustic avant-garde, offering visionary cues for a possible return to the origins of sound production.

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18/04/2018