Tidskapsel#1 (Time Capsule No. 1) is the fifth album by Norwegian reed player, composer, and musical conceptualist Anders Lønne Grønseth and his Multiverse quintet, featuring Grønseth focusing here only on the tenor sax, trumpeter Hayden Powell, pianist Hayden Powell, double bass Audun Ellingsen, and drummer Einar Sceving, augmented by classical-traind harpist Sidsel Walstad. The album was recorded at Musikkloftet in Asker in May 2024.
Tidskapsel#1 revolves around the concept of time and explores Grønseth’s distinct musical ideas, particularly his theories on tonality (The Bitonal Scale System, a modal-harmonic system) and his guiding principle of structured freedom: Improvisations are part of the composition, and the soloist is part of the collective. Each composition and improvisation by Multiverse delves into aspects such as duration, development, repetition, pace, pulse, rhythmic layering, and the interplay between cyclic and linear motion, while balancing reflection and spontaneity, structure and freedom, individuality and communality.
Grønseth wrote a prose text affirming the statement: Music is time: «The first note is an instant; / the next creates a chain / held together only by memory, / weaving a map / of textures, shapes, directions, possibilities. // That’s music, / or a tree drawing circle in its veins… The tree keeps a map of time, / hidden to the world until its time has passed». The titles of the pieces refer to time – «Khronos», «Eon», «Kairos», and «Chronism». The album’s booklet adds Grønseth’s brief analytical insights on his musical theory and the Bitonal Scale System (and all are available on Grønseth’s website).
There is no need for a deep knowledge of musical theory (though it would be helpful) to appreciate Grønseth’s thoughtful, intricate, and multi-layered compositions, with clever games of “scale explosions” and odd-beat meters. The six compositions blossom gently with a mysterious inner, introspective, and lyrical logic, blurring the distinction between the composed themes and their improvised abstractions, or, as Grønseth says, the music goes where it will and must, within a given framework. Walstad fits organically into the elaborative improvisational dialogs of the Multiverse quintet and plays a beautiful solo piece, «Eon». Tidskapsel#1 marks a shift into a unique blend of contemporary modal music and modern, chamber jazz, over the previous explorations of resonant themes with Indian Raga and Middle-Eastern maqams.
Eyal Hareuveni
Anders Lønne Grønseth (tenor saxophone), Hayden Powell (trumpet), Espen Berg (piano), Audun Ellingsen (bass), Einar Sceving (drums), Sidsel Walstad (concert harp)
