Huntsville - Bow Shoulder

2020 release

Once the curious listener digs into the music on Bow Shoulder it becomes difficult not to ask why it’s taken a decade for its impeccable contents to see the light of day. The recording was made in Chicago at the Loft—the studio and rehearsal space of Wilco, the exploratory rock combo, whose members Nels Cline (guitar) and Glenn Kotche (percussion) contributed to this album—the day after Huntsville performed in the city’s Millennium Park, sharing a bill with On Fillmore, Kotche’s duo with bassist Darin Gray. That evening Cline and Kotche joined Huntsville for the final part of its set. In the studio Huntsville’s Ivar Grydeland, Ingar Zach, and Tonny Kluften were joined at the Loft by Cline, Kotche, Gray and keyboardist Yuka Honda (co-founder of Cibo Matto and an accomplished composer) for a fully improvised session.
 
The vitality and focus of improvised music can suffer under the weight of so many voices—the old “too many cooks in the kitchen” syndrome—but among the reasons that Bow Shoulder succeeds so well is that the guest players expertly maintained their own personal identities while utterly subscribing to the percolating strain of ambient drift, textural interplay, and dusky melodicism that Huntsville had developed over the years. As Grydeland marvels, “I think it is pretty amazing how Nels, Glenn, Yuko, and Darin managed to blend into our project, our music, our way of improvising, our aesthetics.” His trio had previously improvised with outside musicians, but for this project he envisioned “a recording that sounded like Huntsville, but with these amazingly great musicians as guests—not just seven musicians improvising with no preconceptions. Like most of our other recordings, decisions about amps, instruments, positioning, volume, the sound in the recordings space, etc., are important factors that contribute to the direction of the improvisations.”

more here:

https://hubromusic.com/huntsville-yoka-honda-nels-cline-darin-gray-glenn-kotche-bow-shoulder-cd/