sun|never|sets|on|music

Strange Hands

EIVIND AARSET

Re-released 17 April 2026

Jazzland Recordings

*****

An enthralling, cinematic blurring of guitar, electronics and chamber textures that is atmospheric, restless and shaped by the quiet drama of space itself.​

​

Few guitarists in European jazz have developed a sonic identity as immediately recognisable as Eivind Aarset. Emerging from Norway’s fertile experimental scene through collaborations with the likes of Nils Petter Molvær and Bugge Wesseltoft, Aarset has spent decades dissolving the boundaries between jazz improvisation, ambient electronics, post-rock and contemporary composition. His landmark 1998 debut Electronique Noire remains a touchstone for atmospheric jazz guitar, but his later work has only deepened that language.

Since his last solo album, the acclaimed Phantasmagoria, or A Different Kind of Journey, (2021), Aarset has released no less than six separate collaboration albums. For "Strange Hands" he returns to his long-running quartet. Joined by violinist Sara Övinge and Mira Thiruchelvam on pullankulal (a traditional South Indian bamboo flute with eight finger holes, primarily used in Carnatic music), Aarset (guitar and electronics), Audun Erlien (bass), Wetle Holte (drums/percussion) and Erland Dahlen (drums/percussion) expand their shared vocabulary into something at once leaner and more unpredictable. The music feels closer to the bone: fewer obvious adornments, more direct impact, yet still bathed in the shifting light and shadow that have made Aarset’s records so uncannily cinematic.

Strange Hands feels like a record built from atmosphere before melody, yet it never disappears into abstraction.

The opening “Snow Crash” and title track establish the album’s terrain immediately: suspended tension, luminous guitar tones and rhythm sections that seem to move more like weather than pulse. “Slumberjack” and “Deep Green” are among the strongest moments, balancing intimacy with scale — violin and bansuri not functioning as ornamental colour, but as structural voices bending harmony and reshaping the emotional centre of the music. On “Deep Green,” the sense of nocturnal stillness opening into something wider and more luminous is especially striking.

“Space Bob” and “What Drifts Below” push further into that hallucinatory edge, where acoustic strings, wood and skin remain tangible even as the music seems to hover just outside physical form.

This is neither fusion or ambient jazz, nor post-rock for that matter, it is a genre of Aarset’s own making - one that values atmosphere without sacrificing immediacy, and Aarset sounds like an artist who no longer needs to prove invention — only to inhabit it fully.

​

Read more...

Eivind Aarset

Bandcamp

Spotify

YouTube