words were coming out our ears presents an unorthodox Swedish free-improvising quartet, featuring pianist Johan Graden, double bass players Vilhelm Bromander and Pär Ola Landin, and drummer Nils Agnas. The quartet’s debut album was recorded at Atlantis Studio in Stockholm in April 2024.
Belgian artist Liesbeth Van Heuverswijn’s cover artwork informs the attentive and intimate, and introspective aesthetics of this unique quartet, allowing the music to flow naturally with its own concise logic, through open, intuitive improvisation and deep listening interplay. This is an egalitarian quartet, in its best Scandinavian meaning of the term, where leading roles shift constantly, and all the musicians support the harmony but also take on melodic and textural roles. The album’s introspective and contemplative, unhurried and sparse atmosphere corresponds with minimalist, chamber jazz.
As in previous releases of the Belgian Aspen Edities, words were coming out our ears is framed by a poetic quote that hints at the spontaneous and poetic spirit of the music-making. This time an inspired one, by Polish poetess Wisława Szymborska (and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature) from the last lines of her poem «Some People Like Poetry»: «…But I just keep on not knowing, and I cling to that / like a redemptive handrail». Danish drummer Kresten Osgood adds in his liner notes that the quartet’s music has «a distinct language emerges throughout the album—an aesthetic blueprint quickly takes shape, drawing us into a world of clarity and fervor, a world where we believe what is being said… these four contemporary artists are making an honest musical statement about what it means to be human in their time. This is what we need. This is why jazz remains a vital and contemporary.»
The album offers nine short pieces, seven are credited to the quartet. «Go, Leave» is a surprising and touching cover of the Canadian folk singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle (who was married to singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, originally performed on Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Warner Bros.., 1976, and covered by Richard and Linda Thompson, Anne Sofie von Otter and Elvis Costello, and Antony). The last piece, «kontradans», features guest musicians – contrabassoonist Katarina Agnas and trumpeter Emil Strandberg, and adds a surreal, orchestral touch.
Graden is also a member of another Stockholm-based, experimental chamber quartet, Ināra Quartet, with other members of the Agnas family – guitarist-composer Kasper Agnas and double bass player-cellist Mauritz Agnas, and with percussionist Mischa Grind. This quartet was formed in 2022, and its music blends free improvised, minimalism that references the seminal work of Terry Riley and Moondog, and imaginary, ritualist abstractions of folk music – Bulgarian music and Scandinavian folk music, notably Norwegian gangar music, with more poetic ideas borrowed from Khalil Gibran and the Qasaid of the Mouridiyyah.
Diakron is the debut EP of Ināra Quartet and features two pieces by Graden and another two by Kasper Agnas, all focusing on the emergent poetics of unity and dissolution. These mysterious, disorienting pieces, often to the point of chaos, offer different degrees of merging and separation, but all flirt cleverly with the pulsating potentiality at the core of silence, «the inaudible light which illuminates our audible worlds», with great focus on detail.
Eyal Hareuveni
Johan Graden (piano), Nils Agnas (drums), Pär Ola Landin (double bass), Vilhelm Bromander (double bass), Emil Strandberg (trumpet), Katarina Agnas (contrabassoon), Mauritz Agnas (double bass, cello), Kasper Agnas (guitar), Mischa Grind (percussion)
