Atomic - Lucidity

'Lucidity' assembles the various components that form Atomic's music in a thoroughly recognisable yet surprising (and sometimes disconcerting) way, suggesting multiple time signatures, motifs and submotifs, musical tracery that seems to defy explanation in conventional terms.

They take moments of minimalist simplicity and contextualise them, by turns, in amorphous textures, angular musical structures, whimsical interplays and rushes of driving frenzy. A track might swing in on muscular arms from the highest reaches of the jungle canopy, bedecked in its finest groove, before shedding its ape suit to reveal something altogether more ethereal.

They seem to hurtle in freefall spirals, before raising merry hell with free improvisations, looping and diving amid each other's vapour trails, and managing to recalibrate simultaneously their alignment and launch into the next composed passage without batting an eyelid.

For all the oomph and swagger, there are moments of fragile beauty in there, too. H�vard Wiik's piano lines sometimes seem eggshell thin amid the hubbub, yet they remain solid, unbuckled. Newly-arrived Hans Hulb�kmo more than ably batters and rattles in Paal Nilssen-Love's stead, displaying a similar, yet personally signed, technique.

Personnel: Fredrik Ljungkvist (tenor saxophone and Bb clarinet), Magnus Broo (trumpet), H�vard Wiik (piano), Ingebrigt H�ker Flaten (bass), Hans Hulb�kmo (drums)