''Terje Rypdal is the Jan Garbarek of the electric guitar: a musician who makes his instrument sound more like a violin or a pan pipe than the wilder, rougher axe of, say, Jimi Hendrix, one of his early models.
A Norwegian, Rypdal came from a rock background in the 1960s, against the grain of influences from his father, an orchestral conductor. But for the most part, he has explored a spacious, moonlit, depopulated world closer to Garbarek's. Like Garbarek, he has stayed with the ECM label for decades and had a productive early relationship with the jazz composer George Russell. But Rypdal often works with classical orchestras and some of his work is more symphonic (though minimalist) than typically electro-acoustic, improvisational or jazz.
This set was recorded live at the Molde jazz festival in July 2000. It is a five-movement, semi-classical piece featuring Rypdal and three others: trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, with his haunting, secretive, Miles Davis-like sound; a vocal soprano; and Iver Kleive, who, with his fearsome cathedral-organ roar, explores the remarkable mixture of traditional and programmed sounds of the new state-of-the-art organ at Norway's Molde church.
For Rypdal fans or guitar buffs, the contribution of the leader is pretty modest, and the remarkable Mikkelborg is at least as prominent a solo voice. But it is Kleive's organ that provides the real surprises in what is for the most part a familiar Scandinavian new-music scenario of long, slowly exhaling ambient sounds, minimal melodic movement and devotion to the minutiae of texture.
However, the interventions of the soloists frequently make effective contrasts with the surroundings. Mikkelborg releases sudden blizzards of sound over hymnal backdrops early on. Later he soars high against a ghostly shiver of violins, and the hiss of air through his horn is as telling as his fully-formed notes. Rypdal's extraordinarily lyrical guitar, meanwhile, waits until the second movement, rising to a high squeal against the thunder of the organ.
Some of this set produces qualities of sound that are really remarkable, particularly Kleine's unaccompanied passages, in which quiet, doodling episodes suddenly erupt into furious dissonance, then fall back to a filing-into-church murmur. But this disc is not for listeners who get fidgety about ambient music: the set doesn't overly concern itself with memorable melodies, or harmonic movements that go somewhere unexpected, except when the improvisers are playing against them.'' The Guardian