Basically album

Distributed by Bergen Kunsthall Records on vinyl and digital download. The album was developed in conjunction with the first solo exhibition of Basically at Bergen Kunsthall in the spring of 2021.

The Basically album illustrates two of the core musical atmospheres within the Basically ecosystem, composed and produced by Jordan Balaber, Nikima Jagudejev and Lester St Louis. Part collage, part fly-on-the-wall audio documentary, the set captures two 20-minute improvised performances and interlaces them with excerpts captured throughout the extensive writing period at the Kunsthall, weaving them into polytemporal tapestries. In winter 2020, several mics were set up around Bergen Kunsthall’s gallery V, as well as in living rooms in Queens, New York and Portland, Oregon where the material was being composed, scored and recorded; a dispersed process, connected through music across distance. The album consists of two tracks, Orbit Arps (side A) and Krampus (side B).

In Orbit Arps, the Bergen-based guitarists Bård Aarvik and Salomon Poutsma were given mutable scores which necessitated collaboration and real-time negotiation, requiring them to make decisions about structure, pitch and tempo within the confines of a harmonic “road-map” and a set of rules. Simultaneously, re-tuned guitar chimes, variably sympathetic and disruptive, and improvised vocal excerpts recorded remotely by Jagudajev, were triggered from an Ableton session by Nikoline Ursin Erichsen, weaving microtonal spiderwebs alongside the guitarists. A “road-map” was also given to Portland-based pianist June Jenkins who navigated through the harmonic options with improvisational freedom, forming her own intuitive vignettes. The recorded material was then sent to the composers in Queens where it was edited, re-tuned and reassembled. The base layer of the track is an unedited performance from gallery V in November 2020. The recording places the listener at the center of the rehearsal space at Bergen Kunsthall, where dancers are lounging, chatting, and practicing their material as musicians play. Interruptions occur, the guitarists are heard discussing which direction to go within the score, and the divergent rhythms of the arpeggios rub up against one another, giving way to new, polymetric configurations.

Krampus uses a similar collage-like approach, merging two longform improvised performances on drop-tuned electric guitars from Balaber and St. Louis with snatches of Jagudajev’s cell-phone-recorded incantations, Jenkins’ home-studio piano improvisations, and a field-recording of Aarvik and Poutsma performing the material in the reverberant foyer of the Kunsthall. The piece stems from an electric guitar technique the composers developed and referred to as “purring”, in which the pick is scraped across muted, overdriven strings to emit a rainbow of crunched harmonics. Central to the performance is a sense of temporal distortion. The guitarists develop intuitive rhythmic phasing patterns, sensitively wafting in and out of eachother’s proposed meters, occasionally landing on consonant, driving polyrhythms. The music evokes the German Christmas demon Krampus via the naive and ritualistic energy of a sweat-soaked teenage metalhead’s basement jam, conjuring an atmosphere that’s both cathartic and bleak. The refined editing process allows for spiritual synchronicity between the four remote performances, swirling them into a shimmering sludge that audience members later described as a kind of “organic techno”.