Barefoot in Bryophyte is a collaboration between musicians embedded in Norway’s jazz and experimental music scenes. Some of it, though, sounds nothing like what might be expected. Take the fourth track, “Paper Fox.” Figuratively, it lies at the centre of a Venn Diagram bringing together Mazzy Star, 4AD’s 1984 This Mortal Coil album It'll End in Tears and the more minimal aspects of Baltimore’s Beach House. It’s quite something.
Then there’s the shoegazing-adjacent “So Low” which does, indeed, bear a familial resemblance to Low were they stripped of their tendency towards embracing noise. The beautiful, intense, spacey “Colors” pushes even further in this direction. It’s unlikely these tracks were meant to evoke any of this, more probably that this is how the musical cookie crumbled. Even so, Barefoot in Bryophyte is a treat for anyone with a yen for modern psychedelia, post-rock, shoegazing or similar.
Vocalist and composer Mari Kvien Brunvoll – who treats her voice and melds it with acoustic and electronic instrumentation – performs and records solo along with being a member of the often impressionistic ensemble Building Instrument. She has also collaborated with jazz guitarist Stein Urheim. They first played together with the boundary pushing jazz-rooted trio Moskus – Fredrik Luhr Dietrichson, Hans Hulbækmo and Anja Lauvdal – at the 2023 Vossa Jazz Festival, an immersive performance caught by The Arts Desk. Now, they’ve gone into the studio.
Not all of the album evokes shoegazing at its broadest. More than one sonic aesthetic is at play, as it often is with collaboration albums. The title track is based around clattering percussion and melds Jon Hassell’s Fourth World Music with a Martin Denny like exotica – fellow Norwegian Arve Henriksen operates in similar territory. “Fenomenolodi” has Robert Wyatt/Matching Mole touches. “Yellow Flower” is close to Moskus as they have been on their own, albeit also with the hints of Robert Wyatt. But it’s the tracks taking all the involved parties into so unexpected a direction which marks-out Barefoot in Bryophyte as a landmark for these five musical individualists. Further excursions along these lines would be very welcome.
