The Internet features a Stockholm-based quartet led by experimental drummer-composer Dennis Egberth with reeds player Oskar Carls, who plays with the punk band Viagra Boys, double bass player Joe Williamson, known from free jazz bands like The Electrics and Tobias Delius Quartet, a guitarist Niklas Fite, known from his free improvised collaborations with iconic Sven-Åke Johansson and Raymond Strid. Egberth wrote nine compositions for this quartet that plays with the Japanese flute tradition, including the shakuhachi that is associated with Zen Buddhism, and with European schools of free improvisation and art music and spiritual jazz. The quartet’s debut album was recorded at Örnsbergs Musikstudio in March 2022.

This quartet offers an exotic, post-modernist pastiche of sounds and influences, as can be expected from anyone who is supposedly glued to the internet, but always spun in surprising and unpredictable manners by these creative improvisers. The Internet begins with the spiritual-ceremonial «Deep Flute Duo», with Carls on Shakuhachi and Egberth on bells, then swings – literally – to an intoxicating jazz groove on «Gurli», experiments with a sparse but suggestive free improvisation on «Madam B», and back to the hard-singing «Skarvarna», but spicing it with thorny, dissonant guitar lines of Fite. The beautiful and soulful ballad «En Dag», where Fite’s guitar and Carls’ tenor sax sing – literally – the melody. «Scwingen» and «Luna», both with Carls on the shakuhachi, are abstract free improvisations where all four musicians investigate the sonorities of their respective instruments, but the latter piece manages to gravitate toward a mysterious and hypnotic melody.

Eyal Hareuveni

Oskar Carls (shakuhachi, fl, ts), Niklas Fite (g), Joe Williamson (b), Dennis Egberth (dr, perc, mellotron)