Imaginal (Imaginary in Danish) is the tenth album of the Danish genre-free quartet Girls in Airports—sax player Martin Stender, keyboard player Mathias Holm Jørgensen, percussionist Victor Dybbroe, and drummer Anders Vestergaard—now augmented with the Halvcirkel contemporary string trio: violinist Bettina Maria Ezaki, violist Mika Persdotter Svensson, and cellist Nicole Hogstrand. This unique yin-yang ensemble—the all-male quartet with the all-female string trio—offers a folky-futurist sound that imagines a turbulent rhythmic sea.

The album is structured as an eleven-movement suite shaped over a year and a half of long sessions. This ad-hoc septet gathered in the rehearsal room in Copenhagen’s neighbourhood, Vanløse, or met in a basement in another of Copenhagen’s neighbourhoods, Nørrebro, where ideas were explored and refined in an open and curious space. The album was recorded at historic Radio House in Copenhagen.

This long process clearly affected the music’s organic flow, blending elements of Nordic jazz of the ECM school, Nordic folk, chamber jazz and contemporary music, synth-heavy textures (with a necessary wink to Brian Eno’s ambient Music for Airports), echoes of 60s and 70s spiritual jazz, and infectious melodic themes. Stender is the main composer, but some pieces are new arrangements of Girls in Airports’ old material, and Halvcirkel wrote one piece, «Nidingen». The genre-bending music is openly emotional, intimate, and vulnerable, articulated gently with nuanced, thoughtful elegance and captivating beauty. Girls in Airports call it «Music that slows time — and opens space, an album about presence, movement, and transformation».

Eyal Hareuveni

Bettina Maria Ezaki (violin), Mika Persdotter Svensson (viola), Nicole Hogstrand (cello), Martin Stender (saxophone), Mathias Holm Jørgensen (keyboards), Victor Dybbroe (percussion), Anders Vestergaard (drums)