With Love is the fourth album of the Oslo-based quartet Emmeluth’s Amoeba – Danish alto sax player, composer, and bandleader Signe Emmeluth, Norwegian guitarist (and her partner) Karl Bjorå, Danish pianist Christian Balvig, and Norwegian drummer Ole Mofjell. With Love, as Emmeluth says, because music is love and love is the only way forward.
In recent years, everyone wants Emmeluth on their side. She plays in Paal Nilssen-Love Large Unit and Circus, Mats Gustafsson’s Fire! Orchestra, Gard Nilsen’s Acoustic Unity, Andreas Røysum Ensemble, and Hyperboreal Trio (with Ingebrigt Håker Flaten). With Love provides plenty of reasons why all seek her unique, fresh voice. She charges every ensemble with uplifting energy, infectious joy, passion, and wit, woven with an uncompromising will to experiment and expand her musical language beyond the familiar territories of free jazz.
With Love offers Emmeluth’s Amoeba as a band that already established during its intense tours a tight, telepathic dynamics, using Emmeluth’s compositions as a trigger for complex improvisations, and relying on its distinct voices of Bjorå, Balvig, and Mofjell. Emmeluth and Bjorå crisscross the urgent themes, often comprised into sharp, melodic but spiky phrases, while Balvig and Mofjell dictate powerful, propulsive rhythmic ideas.
But the dynamics of this quartet are not strict, and the music constantly shifts its rhythmic ideas between all four musicians. Balvig and Mofjell often take the leading roles, while Emmeluth focuses on experimenting with extended breathing techniques and producing rhythmic phrases, and Bjorå experiments on his thorny, effects-laden guitar, with a sound that corresponds with Sonny Sharrock and James «Blood» Ulmer. These exploratory aesthetics are best captured in the aptly-titled «Pling Plong MF/Dripping Liquids/Pling Plong MF», and the complex and eruptive «Something Old». Emmeluth’s Amoeba surprises with the last, moving and fragile ballad, «Gåen», with mysterious solos of Balvig and Emmeluth, before gravitating into its cathartic coda.
Emmeluth’s Amoeba acts like an ever-changing amoeba-like entity, with an inspiring, life-affirming mind and will of its own, one cell, one organism, one amoeba.
Eyal Hareuveni
Signe Emmeluth (alto saxophone), Karl Bjorå (guitar), Ole Mofjell (drums), Christian Balvig (piano)
