The Norwegian retro-futuristic space jazz quintet Billy Meier (named after Swiss Eduard Albert «Billy» Meier and his theories on space flights, extraterrestrial activity, contacting beings from outer space, and visiting faraway planets) celebrates its first ten years as a band with its most ambitious album to date. Ten takes a sharp turn from the former escapist, extraterrestrial sonic fantasies of Billy Meier’s previous three albums and suggests earthy dreamscapes with many guests.
Billy Meier—flutist Henriette Eilertsen, violinist Hans Kjorstad, guitarist Sander Nordahl, bassist Martin Morland, and drummer Ivar Asheim—keep its spacious, vintage synth-heavy, sensual grooves. But now the new pieces are colored by guests: American guitarist-songwriter Blake Mills (who has played with Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan), Norwegian vocal trio Nothing Personal, soprano Hedvig Haugerud, veteran folk musician Steinar Ofsdal (a professor emeritus at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, where the musicians of Billy Meier met), and Swedish saxophonist Karl Hjalmar Nyberg.
Nyberg ornaments the retro, mathematical, and fusion-like piece «The Sun» with his sax. Mills guests on drummer Asheim’s «2200», and sang through his effects-laden guitar, exploring delicate, sustained tones of guitar choir. Haugerud sings on «Moving Metaphor» and is a colleague of Billy Meier from their days at the Norwegian Music Academy in Oslo. Ofsdal’s EWI (electronic wind instrument) on «The EWI DREAM» adds an eerie, timeless sound to Billy Meier’s exotic dreamscape. The collaboration with Nothing Personal on «BM x NP» was created from remote improvised pieces of both bands, edited into a new piece that stresses the vulnerability of such a distant meeting.
As expected, the outcome is genre-defying, eccentric, and sometimes even quirky, but with a strong, mature identity. Billy Meier has developed an impossible recipe that may sound quite outrageous at first, but it works and is produced well. This quintet thinks of music, and especially jazz music, as an inclusive form that welcomes and can be accommodated peacefully with Norwegian folk music, psychedelic space-rock, fusion, free improvisation, and even new jazz and exotica. Ten makes a good argument for that tasteful stew of genres.
Eyal Hareuveni
Henriette Eilertsen (flute, effects), Hans P. Kjorstad (violin, synthesizer), Sander Eriksen Nordahl (guitar, synthesizer), Ivar Asheim (drums, percussion, drum machine), Martin Morland (bass, synthesizer), Blake Mills (guitar), Nothing Personal (vocals), Hedvig Haugerud (soprano), Karl Hjalmar Nyberg (tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone), Steinar Ofsdal (EWI)
