Norwegian composer and electronic musician (and pianist) Kjetil Husebø composed Contours of Texture in February and March 2026, a few months after he lost his youngest brother, Andreas Hamre Husebø (1988-2025), to whom the album is dedicated. Naturally, the album’s music is informed and shaped by loss, grief, absence, and transformation.

But Contours of Texture is not a dark, melancholic album, even though it clearly visits dark, unstable sonic territories and reflects the unsettling experience of losing a loved one. Husebø transforms his most personal experience and the painful and vulnerable feelings into a greater human experience, as he moves through the whole stages of mourning, but also reflects the current local and global political uncertainty, a time that carries a broader sense of fragility and unrest.

The music reflects both the personal and the broader political dimensions: a tension between vulnerability and persistence, stillness and disturbance. Husebø finds comfort, beauty, fragile clarity, and moments of repose even in these dark times. His clever structuring of the music with nuanced layers of synths, samplers, and electronics allows him to suggest microtonal shifts and drifting harmonic centres that are constantly moving between light and shadow, cementing the notion of a sound world in constant motion, where nothing remains entirely fixed.

Contours of Texture may be Husebø’s most intimate and personal album to date. It is a contemplative meditation on loss and grief, but it is also a thoughtful, life-affirming statement. The organic mix of synthetic textures with acoustic and orchestral sensibilities, continuously dissolving into each other, further deepens the album’s impressive way of blending fragile, emotional healing with the intricate, creative sonic process.

Eyal Hareuveni

Kjetil Husebø (synthesizers, samplers, electronics)