20/01/2025
Very nice review on Dans les arbres latest album l'album vert by Peter Margasak!
His blog 'Nowhere Street' is highly recommended!!
Ivar Grydeland
Dans Les Arbres
The dynamic improvising quartet Dans Les Arbres is creeping up on the 20th anniversary of its first album, but it’s hard to imagine this ensemble making a fuss about it. In 2006 the group released that eponymous debut on ECM, with the French clarinetist Xavier Charles finessing a seamless, utterly fluid ensemble sound alongside three Norwegian musicians—percussionist Ingar Zach, guitarist Ivar Grydeland, and keyboardist Christian Wallumrød. From the beginning the quartet embraced an increasingly dominant 21st century model for free improvisation—a practice pioneered by AMM back in the late 60s—turning to a unified mass of sound rather than a meeting of individuals responding or ignoring the machinations of collaborators in real time. The catalog of extended techniques and bespoke noises that each brought to the table has made Dans Les Arbres consistently rewarding as it regularly discovers new ways to blend those elements. Still, I was quite surprised when I first listened to the group’s latest album L’album Vert (Aspen Edities), which was released in December.
As the musicians have developed and shifted their practices individually, it’s only natural that those shifts would work their way into collective efforts, but the dramatically more kinetic sounds really grabbed my attention. Grydeland has been spending more and more time with the pedal steel, preferring to use it as a kind of tabletop analog rather than a melodic instrument known for its eerie sustain and liquid motion, while Wallumrød has steadily enfolded more electronics into his work. And while Zach and Charles are still using the same basic hardware, their soundworlds have evolved, too. I only just noticed that the quartet has digitally released a variety of concert recordings on its Bandcamp page over the last few years, so on Mausoleum, for example, you can hear some of Wallumrød’s electronics entering the fray, but L’album Vert is a much different proposition. All three tracks are distinguished by terse, loosely rhythmic sound tattoos, a kind of crazy off-kilter groove that is irregular, steadily contracting and expanding. Charles toggles between unpitched breaths, striated curlicues, and percussive tongue slapping while Grydeland produces barbed tangles and pitch-bent chording, so it’s Zach and Wallumrød that embrace that more jagged, splattery rhythmic attack, although to be fair, all four of them do circle around to those staccato patterns.
As you can hear on the opening piece “les veux coutent,” there are tones that extend beyond breaths. Halfway through the piece a wavering sustain emerges—maybe a looped pedal steel tone?—but it serves mostly as a kind of binding agent for the swoops, stabs, and spatters. But that’s not to suggest the more isolated sounds wouldn’t mesh or work together without that sustained presence. Indeed, the musicians are still listening closely, fitting those terse gestures together as if solving a jigsaw puzzle exclusively by shape. On the second piece Wallumrød sets the tone with a series of prepared piano motives around which the others orbit and collide, at least until the pianist moves on to something else, a peripatetic quality that connects the group’s oldest work to its most recent. The third and final piece incorporates some comparably loud synth outbursts and carpet bombed beats, adding unexpected tension and some extreme dynamics. Ultimately, the quartet’s modus operandi hasn’t changed much; it remains focused on constructing an elaborate sonic edifice in real time, but rather than building curved structures now Dans Les Arbres is channeling sonic manifestations of impossible objects.
