Norwegian pianist-sound artist composer Kjetil Husebø will celebrate his 50th birthday in May, and in April, the release of his twelfth album, Piano Transformed – Interspace, which reflects Husebø’s musical landscapes. This double album was recorded at fellow pianist Morten Qvenild’s Ugla lyd studio in Nesodden by co-producer and sound engineer (and guitarist) Juhani Silvola during three intensive days in May 2024.
This 18-piece, solo album offers the full spectrum of Husebø’s patient and thoughtful aesthetics, and completes a trilogy that began with Piano Transformed and continued with Live at Nasjonal Jazzscene (Optical Substance, 2017 and 2020). Husebø extends the acoustic grand piano’s natural palette with live sampling and subtle electronics, and sketches abstract and minimalist soundscapes and fleeting, naked melodic themes, but also experiments on Piano Transformed – Interspace with more challenging, provocative and confrontational textures. He attempts to find a seamless, intuitive ecosystem – or «Cosmic Connections», as one of the pieces is titled – between these two supposedly opposing sonic poles.
Norwegian scholar Tore Stavlund contributed liner notes and connected Husebø’s piano extension or transformation to groundbreaking contemporary composer Arne Nordheim’s exploration of how the piano pedal use could create great variations in tonal colors through electronic effects like delay and timbre modulation (on “Listen For Piano” from Colorazione, Philips, 1983). Stavlund thinks that Husebø seeks the interspace between acoustic resonance and electronic noise, impressionist romanticism and architectural modernism, or dreamy reality and sensual melancholy, simply because this is «where the drama unfolds and where the tensions arise, as the movements do not always flow without disturbances – a drama whose dissonance Husebø seeks to reconcile».
But Husebø may have another, deeply humane mission. He asks the listeners to recalibrate or learn anew their sensibility of the duality of music, or the act of «Listening to Life», as another piece is titled. Listening to our sonic life with its many, inevitable contradictions, disturbances, and differences that we accommodate, appreciate how fruitful they can be, and how they may enrich our life, passions, and senses. «Like crepuscular rays on a foggy winter day by a lake, where textured white noise shimmers softly with metaphysical warmth», as Stavlund concludes.
Eyal Hareuveni
Kjetil Husebø (Steinway Model B grand piano, live sampling, electronics, edits)
