Percolation by Christian Wallumrød

The pianist and composer Christian Wallumrød creates music out of silence. Like a visual artist making marks on paper, Wallumrød works away at the blankness of negative space with sound. You could say that sometimes he seems to prefer sound to music, and silence to either, so reticent is his governing aesthetic of less-is-more. This customary method, coupled with a playful air of sensuous quietude, can engender a deeply satisfying listening experience. People who like Christian Wallumrød’s music tend to be partisans who hold it very dear.

Over a by now relatively long and garlanded career as one of Norway and Europe’s foremost younger composers and ensemble-leaders, Wallumrød, who was born in 1971, has gradually established a body of work that is both serious and substantial. It is also fairly uncategorisable, falling between the stools of composition and improvisation, and between new music, folk and jazz, like so much of the most interesting contemporary music. In various permutations, from the defining ECM albums with the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble to his work with the international improvising group Dans les arbres, and through various commissions, from the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra to contemporary choirs, as well as the electronic duo Brutter, formed with his drummer-brother Fredrik, Wallumrød has demonstrated the difficult and unusual feat of working in vastly different contexts yet continuing to seem essentially himself.

But perhaps nowhere does he exhibit this core musical personality more than in his fascinating series of solo piano albums, from Pianokammer (Hubro, 2014), to Speaksome (Hubro, 2021) to this year's new release, Percolation. It’s a musical personality - if we can use that term - that, like his music more generally, is stubbornly resistant to explication and interpretation. It is what it is, and that’s what is so good about it. This singularity is probably what inspires such passionate support among his adherents. As the composer and guitarist Ivar Grydeland - a collaborator with Wallumrød in Dans les arbres - wrote in a text for the previous solo album, Speaksome: “There has always been something historical to the music of Christian Wallumrød. And something futuristic…I feel carried both to the past and the future. I have no idea where I am or when I am. I am flung forwards and backwards.”

Percolation - from the Latin percolare, to filter or trickle through - extends the development of this very personal vision into territory that both builds upon the past and goes further into the experimental future. Through a piano style that is almost wilfully style-less, and which deliberately includes the false steps and clumsy fumbles familiar from the beginnings of any amateur instrumentalist, Wallumrød mines a hard-won sense of humble authenticity. He's not interested in flashy effects or easy virtuosity. As a composer-pianist, the ideas are the thing. The challenge is to get them across without falling prey to facile technique.

In Percolation, Wallumrød also appears to go beyond his customary praxis to create an enhanced sense of communication with his listeners through an unapologetic regard for melody, and for beauty. He also seems to celebrate the institution of the piano itself, linking the instrument's social vocabulary of unintended noise - the stubbing of mistimed fingers on a keyboard or the wheezing breath of a pedal-pushing sustain - to the strong feeling of community that a piano recital can create, irrespective of whether the player is talented or not. Talent may even be beside the point. What matters is the sound and the silence, whoever is playing.

To this end, although the development of the process was already in progress on Speaksome, Percolation goes further into the piano’s traditional folk-memory of real hummable or singable tunes. These can recall, alongside the blue notes of Thelonious Monk and the long decays of Morton Feldman, the austere beauty of pentatonic folksongs and church music. There is also, to my ears, at least a spectral echo of the plinky-plonky singer-songwriter piano vamps of, say, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan. This association might tell you more about the listener than the player, but that is the way Wallumrød, who likes to keep his own counsel, prefers it. “As usual…”, he says, when asked for a pointer or two, "I find it hard to say anything specific about the music itself…which means I could probably say a lot, but it feels somehow not so interesting, perhaps even only disturbing/stupid, compared to the possible thoughts, associations, feelings, visions etc which might (hopefully) occur in the variation of listeners.” So, when Wallumrød plays Deer Naylla, I hear a joyful, almost deja vu-like echo of Neil Young singing ’Till the Morning Comes’.

These lilting bent-notes and country-music harmonies - so redolent of Nordic church music, anyway - can be heard in the gorgeous measures of the tracks Ny gitar, Deer Naylla, and The sing. But this being a Christian Wallumrød solo album, they share house-room with playful experiments where the piano is occasionally doubled by electronic synth-sounds or beats, or in one case gives way to an echo-laden treated autoharp (on You didn’t). On the absolute stand-out track of Higher than your gluteus, a heavy-rolling New Orleans-like left hand ostinato is partnered by a squelchy acid-house synthesised-percussion beat. The overall result is that Percolation, as its title suggests, represents a distillation or essence of the Wallumrød musical identity. While not marking any major departure from his mature style, there is rather a process of subtle refinement at work, so that both the gentle lyricism and the daring experiment we have come to expect in a Wallumrød album, are creatively enhanced in a most satisfactory way.

Of the album’s ten tracks, the first four were recorded at Nordic Black Theatre in July 2023, and the last five at asamisimasa’s studio in June 2024. Track five and part of track six were recorded at Seleverksted in August 2024. All tracks were mixed and recorded by Espen Reinertsen and mastered by Helge Sten at Audio Virus Lab. The album was produced by Christian Wallumrød and Espen Reinertsen.

sofamusic.no