Paal Nilssen-Love has never seemed particularly convinced that music should remain in the room where it was born. Jazz gets pushed towards noise, percussion wanders into composition, Brazilian rhythms enter Scandinavian improvisation, and sooner or later somebody from The Ex appears carrying an electric guitar. It is less a musical career than a long-running refusal to respect property boundaries.

"Calls!" is the third album by Paal Nilssen-Love Circus, following "Pairs of Three" and the live "Turn Thy Loose". The Circus began as an offshoot of Large Unit but gradually developed its own identity, with Nilssen-Love's compositions providing the framework and the musicians allowed considerable freedom in how those materials are assembled during live performances. Onstage, any part of any piece can appear at any time. The method is deliberately unstable: the musicians know the vocabulary, but not necessarily the sentence they are about to speak. For "Calls!", however, Nilssen-Love changes the rules.

The eight pieces were recorded separately in Amsterdam and Oslo and subsequently shaped into a studio album. Even the CD and LP have different running orders because Nilssen-Love considers the two formats to tell different stories. This may sound like the sort of conceptual distinction invented by someone who owns too many test pressings, but here it makes sense. The live Circus depends on collision and surprise; the studio version is concerned with juxtaposition, pacing and contrast. And then there are the guitars.

Terrie Hessels, Andy Moor and Arnold de Boer, all members of the legendary Dutch collective The Ex, join the six-piece Circus. Nilssen-Love's relationship with The Ex goes back decades, so this is hardly an exotic guest appearance. What makes the combination interesting is that The Ex guitars don't simply increase the volume. They change the musical grammar.

The Circus already has a strange internal chemistry: Juliana Venter's voice, Thomas Johansson's trumpet, Signe Emmeluth's alto saxophone and flute, Kalle Moberg's accordion, Christian Meaas Svendsen's bass and Nilssen-Love's drums. Add three electric guitars and, suddenly, the distinction between jazz ensemble, punk band and travelling circus becomes less theoretical.

The opening track, “Eg Såg”, is therefore almost mischievous. It begins with a broken-up excerpt from Arne Garborg's "Haugtussa", the great Norwegian poem-cycle about the visionary girl Veslemøy. Nilssen-Love plays not only drums and percussion but piano, and the arrangement has an unexpectedly intimate, chamber-like character. The piece seems to hover rather than march. Venter's voice inhabits the fragments of Garborg's text without turning them into a conventional song. It is a deceptive beginning.

Because then “Pussy Pussy Cha-Cha” arrives and the record remembers that it has a bass drum.

The track is one of the Circus's more seductive pieces, but seduction here is a slightly dangerous proposition. Venter delivers her own lyrics with an authority that makes the voice feel almost percussive, while Nilssen-Love establishes an infectious pulse underneath the increasingly unruly combination of saxophone, trumpet, accordion and guitar. The Ex's electric guitars provide precisely the sort of abrasive edge that keeps the groove from becoming merely funky. There is something almost indecently effective about it.

The Circus has discovered that a rhythm can be intellectually complicated and still make the body move. Experimental musicians occasionally behave as though dancing were a moral failure. Nilssen-Love seems to regard it as another available physical reaction.

“Calls: Let They Free!” takes that principle further. Arranged by Andy Moor, it is the album's obvious centre of gravity and perhaps the piece most likely to cause trouble in a room full of people who had arrived expecting an evening of serious improvisation. The track is danceable, muscular and politically charged, with Venter's words and Arnold de Boer's megaphone cutting through the rhythmic mass. Its political message is direct, but the music prevents it from becoming didactic.

There is no solemn background drone announcing that A VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE is approaching. Instead, the song moves. It has the physical energy of a protest that has not yet been transformed into a press release. The guitars scratch and grind around the rhythm section, while the horns add flashes of colour rather than smoothing the edges. Nilssen-Love keeps the whole thing in motion. It is probably the closest "Calls!" comes to turning resistance into a dance floor. That is also why the song has appeared prominently in radio programming around the album. Rai Radio 3's "Battiti", for example, included it among its selections in May 2026.

“Nazaré” shifts the geography again. The piece comes from Mestre Barachinha, from Nazaré da Mata in Pernambuco, northeastern Brazil, and belongs to the continuing thread of Brazilian musical exploration that has run through Nilssen-Love's work with Circus. The composer's interest is not academic tourism. He encountered the music through direct experience in the region, after being taken into the cultural landscape of Pernambuco by Brazilian musicians and collaborators. The track is short, but it carries a remarkable rhythmic density.

This is where "Calls!" reveals another of its virtues: it does not treat rhythm as a decorative ethnic ingredient. Brazilian rhythmic ideas are part of the Circus's vocabulary, just as punk and free improvisation are. They sit beside one another without being forced into a synthetic “fusion” accent.

“Seven Times”, at barely two and a half minutes, is almost a miniature. It arrives, establishes its idea, and leaves before anybody has time to write an academic paper about it. This kind of brevity is important on an album otherwise packed with conflicting energies. It prevents the longer pieces from becoming overexplained and gives the sequence a sense of sudden changes in scale.

Then comes “I Should Be So Lucky”, which is not Kylie Minogue's famous pop song, despite the title. It is a cover of the Stretchheads, the obscure British punk band whose record Nilssen-Love encountered decades ago. The connection is revealing. The song comes from the kind of punk tradition that is much closer to the Circus's philosophy than its surface genre might suggest: short, abrasive, absurd, physically committed and completely uninterested in making itself comfortable.

Arnold de Boer contributes vocals here, while the three guitars turn the piece into something wonderfully compressed and unruly. The track lasts only 1:48. Humanity has apparently decided that two minutes is sufficient time to ruin everyone's hair and then move on.

“Slainté” is longer and stranger, moving back towards the Circus's more conceptual side. The title sounds convivial, but the music is not exactly asking us to raise a glass. The ensemble works through shifting patterns and instrumental combinations, allowing the accordion, horns and guitars to occupy different layers of the arrangement. There is an almost theatrical quality to the piece, but without the need for an explicit narrative. This is one of the places where the studio approach becomes especially apparent.

In a live setting, the Circus's freedom means that the listener is partly experiencing the uncertainty of the musicians themselves. On "Calls!", the uncertainty has been edited into shape. We can hear the deliberate contrast between pieces. We can hear where one musical world ends and another begins. The record is less about witnessing spontaneous construction and more about seeing what Nilssen-Love chooses to place next to what. That distinction makes "Calls!" a more composed object than its title might suggest.

The final “Song for Joe” is the album's most extended piece and one of its most affecting. Written by Juliana Venter and Nilssen-Love, it provides another opportunity for the quartet of voice, bass, piano and drums to breathe before the larger electric apparatus intervenes. The composition has a more reflective quality, and the sound of bamboo recorded outside the Francisco Brennand museum in Recife is incorporated into the piece and its aftermath.

That detail might sound almost excessively poetic on paper: bamboo in Recife, Scandinavian musicians, a Dutch punk guitarist, an Oslo studio. Yet it works because the album itself has already established this strange geography. "Calls!" is constantly moving between places and musical memories without pretending that they belong to a single tradition.

There is a particular kind of intelligence in Nilssen-Love's approach to collaboration. He does not seem interested in making everyone sound alike. The point is to put musicians with strong individual identities into situations where those identities become friction. The Ex are ideal for that purpose.

Founded in the late 1970s in the Netherlands, The Ex gradually moved far beyond their punk origins, developing a highly individual approach that incorporated improvisation, African music, experimental composition and collaborations with musicians from radically different backgrounds. Their presence here therefore makes more sense than it might initially appear. The Circus and The Ex share an underlying belief that rhythm can be both political and bodily, that repetition can create freedom rather than merely reinforce structure, and that the boundary between concert and confrontation is pleasantly porous.

The resulting sound is neither punk jazz nor free rock nor experimental dance music. It is simply a band with too many good ideas and insufficient respect for genre police. That may explain why "Calls!" feels more playful than some of Nilssen-Love's larger projects. The music is certainly capable of aggression, but it is rarely solemn about it. Venter can move from poetry to provocation; Moberg's accordion can make the music sound folkloric one second and distinctly unhinged the next; Johansson and Emmeluth supply brass and reed colours that prevent the guitar attack from dominating; Svendsen keeps the low end elastic; and Nilssen-Love is constantly adjusting the machinery underneath them.

The guitars, meanwhile, are not simply three versions of the same instrument. Moor, Hessels and de Boer bring different histories and different ways of occupying the electric spectrum. Their collective sound is rough-edged but remarkably disciplined. That is probably why the combination feels fresh despite the long history between Nilssen-Love and The Ex. The collaboration is familiar enough to be confident, but not so familiar that it becomes predictable.

There is also something quietly radical about the album's refusal to distinguish between the “serious” and the “silly”. "Eg Såg" draws from one of Norway's major literary works. “Calls: Let They Free!” turns political urgency into a danceable anthem. “Nazaré” carries Brazilian rhythmic traditions into the ensemble. “I Should Be So Lucky” comes from British punk. “Pussy Pussy Cha-Cha” has a title that sounds as though somebody lost a bet. All of it belongs here. That coherence does not come from stylistic similarity. It comes from attitude.

"Calls!" understands music as an activity rather than a category. The compositions provide structures, but the musicians remain free to make those structures behave badly. The studio version then adds another layer of control, arranging these episodes into a deliberate sequence. It is precisely this tension between freedom and construction that makes the album more interesting than a simple document of another Circus concert. And there is a nice irony in that.

The live Circus was built around the idea that any musician could suddenly play any part of any composition. The studio album, by contrast, is carefully assembled. The musicians are liberated inside the pieces, while Nilssen-Love becomes more authoritarian about the album as an object. Apparently even freedom needs an editor.

The result is a record that manages to sound both organised and slightly out of control. That is not an easy balance. Too much organisation and the music becomes polite. Too much chaos and the compositions lose their identity. "Calls!" keeps both possibilities active.

Its best moments are therefore not necessarily the loudest ones. They are the moments when the ingredients suddenly lock together: Venter's voice against the guitars, the bass underneath an unruly rhythm, an accordion phrase appearing where a guitar might normally be expected, a Brazilian pattern surfacing inside a Scandinavian ensemble, or a political lyric carried by music that refuses to become solemn.
The album's title becomes increasingly appropriate in that context.

"Calls!" is full of calls: voices, horns, guitars, percussion, references, melodies, political demands, fragments of poetry and musical memories travelling between countries and decades. Some are answered. Others collide. A few simply disappear into the noise. But the important thing is that the band keeps listening.

And that is probably the real strength of this version of Paal Nilssen-Love Circus. It does not attempt to turn its numerous influences into a seamless identity. It lets the seams show. Punk remains punk enough to bite, Brazilian rhythm remains rhythmically alive, Norwegian poetry retains its particular atmosphere, free improvisation remains unpredictable, and the electric guitars are allowed to sound like three people who have no intention of asking permission.

"Calls!" is consequently less a synthesis than a controlled traffic accident.

A remarkably musical one.

There is something suspiciously self-protective about calling a band "It Was Her Idea". It sounds like the musical equivalent of leaving the room before the vase hits the floor. Whatever happened, somebody else suggested it.

In this case, however, the name is almost too appropriate. "Daughter of War" is the debut of a quartet that seems to have been assembled not because its members wanted to reproduce a particular genre, but because four already well-developed musical personalities had discovered that their individual obsessions could be made to interfere productively with one another.

Juliana Venter, Oscar Grönberg, Ole Morten Vågan and Paal Nilssen-Love began playing together in 2022, each bringing compositions to the group. The result is not a Nilssen-Love project with three supporting musicians, nor a conventional vocal quartet. The writing belongs to all four, and that difference is audible almost immediately.

Venter is the obvious focal point, but not necessarily because she sings in the way one expects a vocalist to sing. Her background already gives away the problem with that assumption. Born in Pretoria and raised between Namibia and South Africa before moving through several European cities and eventually settling in Norway, she has worked across classical singing, theatre, film, jazz, free improvisation, contemporary music, folk traditions and extended vocal techniques. Her voice therefore refuses to sit politely on top of the instrumentation. It moves through it.

The opening track, “Three Free Wheels”, provides a good introduction. Piano and double bass establish an atmosphere that initially feels almost chamber-like, with Grönberg's harmonic language creating an uncertain floor beneath the piece. Venter enters without immediately revealing the full extent of what she can do. There is something almost cautious about the beginning, but the caution does not last. Her voice starts to bend away from conventional melodic behaviour, and the quartet gradually reveals itself as something considerably stranger than an acoustic jazz group.

The music seems to be asking a deceptively simple question: what exactly is a song when the singer is allowed to treat singing as only one of the available possibilities? The answer changes from track to track.

“Tickle Tickle” is more mischievous, with the quartet playing around repetition, articulation and rhythmic expectation. The title is almost embarrassingly cheerful for music that keeps refusing to settle into a stable mood. This is one of the pleasures of the album: its seriousness is continually interrupted by a sense of play. Nilssen-Love's drumming is particularly effective because he does not dominate the proceedings. He can puncture a phrase, shadow it, or simply leave enough room for the piano and bass to establish their own little traps.

Grönberg is crucial here. His piano playing gives the quartet an unusually flexible harmonic centre, capable of suggesting a conventional jazz language before suddenly stepping sideways. He has become an increasingly visible presence in the Scandinavian scene, and this recording makes clear why. His contribution is not simply accompaniment. He often seems to be constructing temporary rooms for Venter's voice to enter, occupy and then dismantle.

Ole Morten Vågan provides the other indispensable architectural element. The double bass is both foundation and disturbance, capable of maintaining the physical weight of the ensemble while also pulling against its apparent direction. His long-standing relationship with Nilssen-Love makes the pairing feel natural, but the combination is more interesting than that familiarity might suggest. Without the enormous instrumentation of Large Unit or the relentless rhythmic pressure of some of Nilssen-Love's other projects, the drummer has to listen differently. Here he is less a force of nature than an exceptionally alert conversationalist.

Then comes the title track.

“Daughter of War” is built around music by Juliana Venter and a poem by Khaleda Froagh, the Afghan poet whose work addresses conflict, violence, displacement and the persistence of human experience under circumstances designed to destroy it. This is where the record's eccentricity suddenly acquires gravity.

Venter does not turn the poem into a theatrical monologue in the conventional sense. Her performance is visceral, but also controlled. She can sound exposed without becoming sentimental, and the trio understands that the most effective accompaniment is sometimes almost nothing. Piano, bass and drums create a shifting frame around her rather than forcing the text into a predetermined emotional shape.

There is an important distinction here. The piece is not powerful because it is “about war”. There are already far too many records congratulating themselves for having Serious Themes. It is powerful because Venter makes the voice carry the tension between the personal and the historical. The title suggests a person born into circumstances she did not choose. The song consequently feels less like a declaration about geopolitics than an attempt to give individual presence to something usually discussed in numbers, maps and headlines.
The war is enormous. The voice is not. That imbalance is precisely what makes the piece work.

After this centre of gravity, “Three Grooves for Freya” offers a change of temperature. The piece is more rhythmically playful, but the quartet still avoids the temptation to become a straightforward groove band. The title itself hints at a compositional interest in small units and repeated structures, and Nilssen-Love seems particularly comfortable in this setting, where rhythm can be suggested rather than unleashed.
Then comes “Baæ Baæ Lille Lakselus”, lasting barely eighty seconds.

Human beings have a peculiar habit of putting tiny things in the middle of serious things and then acting surprised when the tiny thing changes everything. Here the miniature piece works almost like a musical wink. Its brevity prevents the album from becoming overdetermined. Just when the listener might start constructing an elaborate theory about the relationship between voice, violence, improvisation and Scandinavian contemporary music, the quartet gives the whole intellectual machinery a gentle shove.

It is useful.

“Cough Song” is considerably more extended and much less decorative. The voice becomes physical again, approaching the body as a source of rhythm and texture rather than merely pitch. The cough itself is an almost absurdly ordinary bodily event, but in this context it becomes musical material. Venter's performance can be abrasive, comic, vulnerable and unsettling without clearly announcing which of these qualities the listener is supposed to choose. That ambiguity is one of the album's strengths.

The quartet does not always distinguish between the beautiful and the awkward. A vocal gesture can be attractive because it is technically accomplished, or because it sounds as though the body is struggling to produce it. A piano chord can function harmonically and then suddenly become a percussive object. A bass line can establish a tonal centre only to undermine it seconds later.

This is where the “noise” and “conceptual” elements mentioned in the album's description actually become meaningful. They are not genres pasted onto a jazz foundation. They describe a willingness to regard musical behaviour itself as material.

The closing “Little Cage” takes this principle to its sparsest extreme. The piece has been compared to the chance-oriented experiments associated with John Cage, and that comparison is useful without needing to turn the track into a Cage imitation. What matters is the removal of expectation.

After the vocal and instrumental density of the preceding tracks, "Little Cage" feels almost like someone has opened a window. Small sounds become conspicuous. Space acquires weight. The quartet no longer needs to demonstrate what it can do because it has already spent the preceding forty minutes demonstrating that it can do rather a lot.

There is also something revealing about the album's sequencing. "Daughter of War" is not constructed as a continuous escalation from accessibility towards abstraction, nor does it proceed according to the usual experimental-music logic in which each track is required to become more difficult than the last. It behaves more like a collection of encounters. Each composition proposes a different relationship between the four musicians, and the album's coherence emerges from the personalities rather than from a single stylistic formula.
That may be why the debut feels convincing without feeling completely settled.

The recording, made by Dag Erik Johansen at Athletic Sound in Halden in May 2025 and subsequently mixed and mastered by Joe Talia, gives the quartet enough definition for those relationships to remain audible. Nothing is buried simply because the music is unconventional. The instruments retain their physical identities, while Venter's voice occupies the centre without becoming artificially separated from the trio.
That balance is essential. Because "Daughter of War" is ultimately not a vocalist-plus-trio record.

It is four composers negotiating what happens when their materials collide.

Nilssen-Love's presence is perhaps the most misleading thing about the project. His name carries associations with large-scale improvisation, percussion-heavy intensity and the kind of free jazz in which the drummer occasionally appears to have declared war on the concept of moderation. Here, however, he is part of a much more intimate mechanism. His playing is often economical, attentive to the spaces between gestures. The album demonstrates that his musical identity is not dependent on sheer volume or physical force.

Venter provides the emotional volatility, Grönberg much of the harmonic uncertainty, Vågan the muscular elasticity of the bass, and Nilssen-Love the rhythmic intelligence that keeps these competing tendencies from becoming four separate records accidentally occupying the same CD.

There is humour in the arrangement of all this seriousness. The band is called "It Was Her Idea". There is a song about coughing. There is a Norwegian children's-song title involving a little salmon louse. There are pieces whose names sound like instructions from a surrealist kindergarten. And yet the album can turn, without warning, towards a poem about war and human devastation.

That tonal flexibility prevents the record from becoming solemn. And solemnity would have been its enemy.

"Daughter of War" works because it understands that experimental music does not need to wear a black suit at all times. It can be grotesque, playful, fragile, irritating, beautiful and politically serious within the same forty-five minutes. Human beings are inconveniently complicated creatures, and music that reflects that complexity is usually more convincing than music that tries to tidy it away.

The album's title track may therefore be its emotional centre, but the record as a whole is more interesting than that one piece. Its real achievement lies in the way the quartet refuses to establish a hierarchy between song, improvisation, composition, noise and theatrical gesture. Everything is allowed into the same room, provided it has something to contribute. And perhaps the most promising thing about this debut is that it does not sound like the final definition of "It Was Her Idea".

It sounds like four musicians have discovered a useful problem. How far can they push the relationship between voice and instruments without turning either into decoration? How much structure can survive improvisation? How strange can a song become before it stops being a song?

"Daughter of War" does not answer these questions conclusively. It does something better. It keeps making them audible.

There is something wonderfully perverse about "What Just Happened?" being released under the name Large Unit: Small Units. Paal Nilssen-Love has spent much of his career proving that an ensemble can behave like a weather system with a percussion section, and here he takes that considerable mass of musicianship and reduces it to four compact experiments: five drummers, six saxophones, three accordions and three tubas. The title sounds less like a statement than the expression of someone discovering, several hours too late, that his scientific experiment has escaped the laboratory.

That response is, in fact, precisely what Nilssen-Love was after. The title originated with his series of Large Unit projects in Oslo, where the intention was to leave performers and listeners uncertain about exactly what had happened to them. The same principle remains at the heart of this 49-minute record, recorded at Tøyen Kirke in June 2025 and released through his own PNL Records.

Nilssen-Love is perhaps best known as one of the great physical forces of contemporary improvised music, a drummer whose career has involved important collaborations with figures such as Peter Brötzmann, Frode Gjerstad and a long procession of musicians unwilling to behave themselves. With Large Unit, however, his role has expanded considerably. Since the ensemble's beginnings, he has used it as a laboratory for collective playing, bringing together younger Norwegian musicians with more established figures while gradually giving composition a more prominent role. PNL Records, founded by Nilssen-Love in 2007, has become an extension of that activity, documenting his own work as well as the many branches growing from the Large Unit family tree.

"What Just Happened?" makes an intriguing proposition: what happens when an ensemble associated with abundance is organised around instrumental monoculture? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

“5 X 10”, written for five drummers, begins by treating percussion almost as a field of controlled disturbance. The five players do not simply pile up rhythms until the poor listener starts checking the smoke detector. Nilssen-Love gives them patterns, repetitions and gradual shifts, making the snare drum itself the protagonist. The effect can initially seem austere, even ceremonial, before small alterations begin to destabilise the apparent order. Five drummers playing essentially the same instrument might sound like an invitation to rhythmic anarchy, but Nilssen-Love is interested in the opposite possibility: how much difference can be extracted from sameness?

This is also where the album establishes one of its central ideas. Limitation becomes an instrument in itself. When every musician has access to the same sonic family, individuality has to emerge through timing, pressure, articulation and restraint. The performers become less like five separate drummers than five different ways of making a snare drum misbehave.

“Spread Rain” moves into more volatile territory. Six saxophones, joined here by Andreas Røysum on bass clarinet, produce a remarkably flexible collective voice, capable of moving from thin air and delicate mechanical noises towards much denser eruptions. The arrangement allows the reeds to behave almost like a single organism at certain moments, before individual voices suddenly protrude from the mass.

This is probably the most immediately convincing piece on the album because Nilssen-Love understands that six saxophones do not need to sound like a larger saxophone section. The interest lies in friction: breath against pitch, multiphonics against recognisable tone, coordinated movement against individual resistance. The piece can be fragile one moment and positively unruly the next. It also demonstrates why this project cannot simply be filed under “free jazz” and left there with a small administrative stamp. There is too much attention to proportion and orchestration. Improvisation is present, but so is the composer standing behind the curtain, moving the furniture around.

Then comes “Dragespel”, perhaps the album's strangest and most rewarding proposition. Three accordions are capable of sounding sentimental, folkloric, comic, funereal or downright threatening, sometimes within the same breath. Nilssen-Love exploits all of those associations without allowing the instrument to settle comfortably into any of them. The piece starts from a sustained, almost organ-like sonority before fragmenting into sharper gestures, sudden movements and strange mechanical eruptions.

The accordion is particularly well suited to this kind of treatment because its expressive mechanism is already slightly theatrical: bellows inhale and exhale, reeds chatter, buttons and keys trigger tiny changes in pressure. Put three of them together and the instrument's traditional musical identity begins to fray. What remains is a wonderfully awkward machine for producing sound. Kalle Moberg, Maren Sofie Nyland Johansen and Mykola Sheremeta seem perfectly happy to investigate the machine room rather than perform the usual postcard version of accordion music. Humanity has spent centuries inventing instruments and then immediately deciding what they are supposed to sound like. Nilssen-Love's answer is essentially: let's not.

“Zlang!” closes the album with three tubas and an impressive refusal to behave like a dignified brass ensemble. Per Ake Holmlander, Børre Mølstad and Sondre Ross Folkestad explore the tuba's enormous lower register as though it were a piece of industrial equipment whose warranty expired sometime in 1978.

There is humour here, but it is not novelty humour. The tuba is funny partly because of its physical presence, yet the composition uses that ridiculousness intelligently. Low brass can sound monumental, absurd, threatening and cartoonish almost simultaneously. Nilssen-Love keeps those possibilities in circulation, allowing fanfare-like gestures to collide with subterranean groans and deliberately ungainly exchanges. It is difficult to imagine another instrument producing quite the same combination of majesty and mild panic. The album's most interesting achievement is therefore conceptual rather than spectacular. Nilssen-Love has taken four instrumental groups that might ordinarily be considered rather limited and discovered that limitation can become a source of compositional abundance. Five snares, six reeds, three accordions, three tubas: the numbers are small, but the possibilities are not.

This also explains why "What Just Happened?" occupies an unusual position within the Large Unit catalogue. Earlier projects have demonstrated Nilssen-Love's appetite for large-scale collective improvisation and increasingly ambitious compositional structures. The Small Units project turns that process inside out. Instead of asking how much sound a large ensemble can generate, it asks how much musical information can survive when the available materials are severely restricted. The answer is enough to fill almost fifty minutes without resorting to the usual free-jazz arms race, where everyone eventually plays louder because somebody apparently misplaced the emergency exit.

The recording at Tøyen Kirke is crucial to the experience. Christian Brynildsen Obermayer handled recording, mixing and mastering, while Nilssen-Love produced the album himself; the church setting gives the instruments enough acoustic presence to reveal their physical qualities without turning everything into reverberant soup.

There is, admittedly, a certain dryness to parts of the record. One recent review found the opening percussion piece comparatively static and regarded the album as the least dynamically varied of Nilssen-Love's three closely related releases. That criticism is not entirely unreasonable. “5 X 10” demands patience, and "What Just Happened?" is not constructed around the instant gratification of escalating intensity. Its pleasures are cumulative, embedded in microscopic changes and in the performers' command of their instruments.

But that apparent austerity is also part of the point. Nilssen-Love is not trying to make a miniature Large Unit. He is dismantling the expectation that more musicians automatically means more possibilities. Sometimes the opposite is true. Remove the safety net of variety and every sound acquires a sharper responsibility.

The record's title consequently becomes more amusing with each listen. At first it sounds like bewilderment. Eventually it feels more like a methodological question. What just happened? A rhythm? A composition? An improvisation? A joke involving three tubas? A serious investigation into instrumental behaviour disguised as an extremely strange afternoon at church? Probably all of them. And perhaps that is the most Paal Nilssen-Love thing about "What Just Happened?": the music never chooses between discipline and mischief. It keeps both alive, letting formal ideas collide with the wonderfully unreasonable fact that humans have built machines out of metal, wood, leather and buttons, then spent centuries finding increasingly inventive ways to make them scream.

Some musical encounters are described as “cross-cultural collaborations” with the sort of solemnity usually reserved for diplomatic summits. A Norwegian free-jazz drummer discovers a traditional Japanese melody, invites a legendary Japanese saxophonist into his large ensemble, and the resulting record is duly presented as a meeting between traditions. Thankfully, "Hohai-Bushi" is far too unruly to behave like a cultural conference.

The title refers to a traditional song from Tsugaru, in Aomori, northern Japan. The word "bushi" belongs to the broad vocabulary of Japanese song titles, while "hohai" is essentially a vocable, a sound rather than a word with a precise semantic meaning. In the traditional form, it functions as a high-register refrain. It is a small but significant detail, because the title itself already points towards something that becomes central to this recording: music does not always need to explain itself in order to carry meaning. Sometimes a sound survives precisely because it is a sound.

Paal Nilssen-Love encountered the song while investigating Tsugaru-Shamisen during the pandemic. Rather than treating the discovery as a source of exotic seasoning for Large Unit, he went deeper into the material and eventually worked on a transcription with Akira Sakata. The melody became the starting point for a new composition, first performed during Large Unit's tenth-anniversary festival in 2023 and subsequently recorded at Tøyen Kirke in Oslo in June 2025.

This history matters because "Hohai-Bushi" does not sound like a Norwegian ensemble attempting to imitate Japanese music. Nor does it sound like a Japanese musician temporarily visiting Scandinavian free jazz. The traditional melody is treated as a living object: something that can be carried elsewhere without remaining unchanged. And carrying it elsewhere turns out to require quite a lot of luggage.

Large Unit is here a formidable fifteen-person organism. Around Sakata's alto saxophone, Bb clarinet and voice are gathered alto and tenor saxophones, baritone saxophone, bass clarinet, flute, trumpet, trombone, tuba, accordion, electric guitar, two double basses, shakuhachi, percussion, gongs and two drum kits. It is the kind of ensemble that makes the concept of “small ensemble subtlety” sound faintly ridiculous. Yet Nilssen-Love does not immediately unleash the whole apparatus.

The opening develops with remarkable patience. Percussion establishes a pulse that feels more ceremonial than propulsive, while individual instrumental colours gradually emerge from the collective sound. There is an almost geological quality to the process. The music seems to accumulate rather than advance, each layer settling over the previous one until the original melody is no longer simply something being played but something around which the entire performance has begun to orbit.

This is where Nilssen-Love's evolution as a bandleader becomes particularly evident. The drummer who has spent decades associated with some of improvised music's most explosive encounters understands that volume is only one form of intensity. Large Unit can certainly produce enormous masses of sound, but "Hohai-Bushi" is interested in the pressure created by anticipation, repetition and gradual transformation.

The effect can be surprisingly majestic. Not “majestic” in the pompous sense. There are no trumpets announcing the arrival of civilisation. Instead, the ensemble moves with a strange, deliberate gravity, sometimes sounding like a procession whose destination nobody has disclosed. A recent listener's account similarly emphasises the piece's massive, slow-moving character, its tendency to proceed through fragments and persistence rather than constant climactic escalation. That patience also gives Sakata room to occupy the music rather than merely decorate it.

Akira Sakata has been one of the most distinctive figures in Japanese free improvisation for more than half a century. His history reaches back to the Yamashita Trio and the explosive development of Japanese free jazz in the 1970s, while his later career has repeatedly brought him into contact with younger musicians and scenes far beyond conventional jazz. His relationship with Nilssen-Love is already substantial: the two have worked together in Arashi, alongside Johan Berthling, since 2013, accumulating extensive touring experience and several recordings. There is therefore no sense here of an elderly legend being wheeled onstage for ceremonial purposes.

Sakata sounds completely embedded in the piece. His alto can be abrasive, vocal, serrated, almost animalistic; his clarinet introduces a different kind of instability; and his voice is eventually given an even more exposed role. The distinction is important. Sakata does not simply improvise over Large Unit. He changes the emotional centre of the performance.

The traditional "Hohai-Bushi" melody is especially interesting in this context because its vocal refrain is semantically empty. The music begins, in a sense, with something that means nothing literally and proceeds to generate an extraordinary amount of meaning around it. That is one of the record's quiet paradoxes. The more Large Unit expands the material, the less important the question of literal translation becomes. Melody turns into gesture; gesture becomes rhythm; rhythm becomes collective physicality. The song is no longer something the listener needs to “understand” in linguistic terms. It has become a structural memory.

The church recording helps enormously. Tøyen Kirke provides a natural reverberation that allows Sakata's voice and instrumental lines to hang in the air rather than being immediately swallowed by the ensemble. The acoustic does not merely make the record sound larger. It gives the music a sense of duration, as though every sound has to pass through a little more space before it reaches the listener. Then, around the middle of the performance, something unexpected happens.

The giant ensemble gives way to Sakata reciting Shuntaro Tanikawa's "What the Dead Man Left Behind", a poem written during the Vietnam War. The text deals with the residue of death, with what remains when a human being does not: family, absence, memory, the painfully ordinary consequences of violence. Sakata has performed the poem in other contexts, including with Arashi, so its appearance here is not an arbitrary literary embellishment. Within "Hohai-Bushi", however, its placement is devastating. After the accumulated weight of the ensemble, the spoken voice suddenly becomes enough. No grand orchestral underline is necessary. No tasteful cinematic sadness is required. The music understands something that film composers occasionally forget: silence can be considerably more intimidating than a string section.

The poem also changes the meaning of the preceding music. Until that point, the recording might be heard primarily as an adventurous reworking of traditional material. Afterwards, the collective sound acquires another dimension. The music is no longer simply negotiating geography and musical language. It is carrying memory, and with it the awareness that traditions are not abstract things. They are transmitted by people, and people disappear. This gives the performance a political dimension without turning it into political theatre.

Nilssen-Love has never been particularly interested in making Large Unit polite. But here the radicalism is not merely sonic. It lies in allowing very different histories to coexist without flattening them into a generic “world music” product. The Japanese folk source remains recognisable as a source, Sakata remains unmistakably himself, and Large Unit remains the unruly Scandinavian collective it has become over the years.

The resulting music does not ask these elements to agree. It asks them to listen to one another. And that distinction saves the whole enterprise from the usual traps of musical fusion. There is no attempt to create a synthetic Esperanto in which everybody plays an approximation of everybody else's tradition. Instead, identities remain visible. The tension between them becomes productive.

At several points the ensemble becomes almost overwhelmingly dense. Brass, reeds, percussion and low frequencies accumulate until the original song seems buried beneath the machinery. But that burial is temporary. Fragments of the melody keep resurfacing, sometimes transformed almost beyond recognition. It is as though the traditional song has been thrown into a river and keeps appearing downstream in altered shapes.

The music is not particularly interested in neat resolutions. That becomes even clearer when Sakata eventually closes the performance alone, playing "Akatombo" by Kosaku Yamada. The contrast is extraordinary. After nearly an hour of collective sound, the final gesture is solitary. The ensemble has spent most of the record demonstrating how much can happen when many musicians occupy the same space; the ending demonstrates how little is actually required.

A single voice, a single instrument, a melody. And suddenly the enormous apparatus disappears.

The choice of "Akatombo" is more than a convenient encore. It creates a second point of contact with Japanese musical memory, allowing Sakata to leave the ensemble behind and return to something intimate and recognisable. The record's scale contracts dramatically, and the listener is left with the impression that the entire preceding performance has been an elaborate route toward this moment of simplicity.

What ultimately makes Hohai-Bushi so convincing is that Nilssen-Love never tries to resolve the contradiction at its centre. The traditional melody remains there, but it is continually forced into unfamiliar surroundings. Sakata brings with him decades of Japanese musical history, while Large Unit subjects the material to its own restless vocabulary. Neither side disappears into the other.

The result is not a musical compromise but a genuine encounter. Sometimes the melody is clearly audible; elsewhere it seems to dissolve into brass, reeds, percussion and low frequencies, only to return later in another shape. The composition breathes through these changes rather than treating them as separate episodes. What begins as a song gradually becomes the organising principle of an entire sonic environment.

That makes the final Akatombo especially effective. After fifty minutes in which fifteen musicians have occupied the acoustic space, Sakata is suddenly alone. There is no need for a final explosion, no grand collective statement, no obligatory crescendo to remind us that this is experimental music and therefore presumably somebody ought to set fire to the furniture. Instead, there is a melody. It is an unusually human ending to a record that has spent much of its duration exploring the possibilities of collective sound. Sakata's solo does not negate what came before it. It puts it into perspective. The huge ensemble, the dense improvisations, the shifts of texture and the moments of near-overwhelming intensity have all led back to something extraordinarily simple: one musician playing a tune.

Perhaps that is the most interesting thing Nilssen-Love has done with Hohai-Bushi. He has taken a traditional song without reducing it to an artefact, opened it up to an ensemble without burying it, and allowed Akira Sakata to inhabit it without turning the collaboration into an exercise in nostalgia.

The music travels a long way, but it never loses sight of where it started.

And when the journey is finally over, it does not leave us with a monument. It leaves us with Sakata, alone, playing Akatombo in the reverberation of a church.

That is enough.

More than enough, actually.

There is something wonderfully unreasonable about calling a 25-piece ensemble an “Extra Large Unit”. At that scale, the adjective starts to lose its meaning and the noun becomes almost comic: this is less a band than a temporary ecosystem, complete with percussion, winds, strings, accordion, harp, voice, four dancers and, eventually, a small invasion of ping-pong balls. Civilization has always had a peculiar talent for organizing enormous quantities of people in order to make something happen, and Paal Nilssen-Love's "Steam Waterfall" turns that impulse into a remarkably coherent musical experiment.

Recorded live at the Oslo Jazz Festival in August 2022, the 75-minute piece expands the Large Unit into its most populous incarnation yet. But numbers are ultimately the least interesting thing about it. What matters is the way Nilssen-Love uses such an unwieldy organism without trying to tame it. Written passages, graphic scores, conceptual instructions, individual solos and collective improvisations coexist without producing the dreadful sensation of a committee meeting disguised as contemporary music.

The opening is particularly revealing. Before the music properly announces itself, we hear the audience entering the space. It is a small gesture, but it immediately unsettles the conventional boundary between performance and preparation. The concert is already happening because people are arriving to hear it. The musicians are not yet performing, but the social machinery surrounding performance has begun. From there, "Steam Waterfall" proceeds less like a conventional composition than like a series of doors opening onto one another.

Nilssen-Love's central concern is precisely this instability: where does a concert begin, and where does it finish? What constitutes a piece when the composer establishes some conditions but leaves considerable responsibility to the performers? These questions could easily produce the kind of solemn theoretical exercise that makes audiences suddenly develop an urgent interest in the emergency exit. Instead, "Steam Waterfall" keeps translating its ideas into physical sound.

The sheer variety of the instrumentation helps. Four tubas alone can alter the gravitational field of an ensemble; several saxophones and clarinets create shifting masses of breath and pressure; harp, accordion, guitar, cello and viola introduce entirely different densities. Then there are multiple percussionists, including Korean traditional drums and gongs, alongside the enormous rhythmic apparatus of Nilssen-Love himself. Rather than presenting these elements as a catalogue of timbres, the piece lets them collide, separate, overlap and disappear. The result is frequently chaotic, but rarely arbitrary. That distinction is crucial. Chaos here is not the absence of structure. It is what structure looks like after being handed over to twenty-five musicians and four dancers and told to behave itself.

Nilssen-Love has long demonstrated an unusual ability to make improvisation feel collective rather than merely simultaneous. His Large Unit project, begun in 2013, has become a particularly fertile laboratory for this approach, bringing together musicians from different generations and musical backgrounds. "Steam Waterfall" pushes that principle further by incorporating younger players he encountered through workshops and teaching. The ensemble therefore becomes partly an orchestra, partly an improvisational network, and partly an experiment in musical transmission.

There is also a refreshing physicality to the recording. One can almost imagine the stage as an unstable map, with sounds appearing in different zones and musical groups forming temporary alliances before dissolving again. The four dancers are not ornamental additions but part of the larger investigation into movement, coordination and collective action. By the end, when 100 ping-pong balls are thrown across the stage, the distinction between musical score and event becomes deliciously ridiculous. The balls bounce on instruments and floor, glasses are apparently sacrificed to the occasion, and suddenly the supposedly abstract question of what a concert is has acquired a very concrete answer: sometimes it involves trying not to get hit by a small white sphere.

Yet the humour does not trivialize the music. Quite the opposite. It exposes the artificiality of the solemn concert ritual. A performance can contain carefully organized material, improvisation, physical movement, accidents, audience behaviour and sheer nonsense, and all of those things can belong to the same artistic space.

The recording itself benefits from being approached as an event rather than a conventional studio album. There is a sense of architecture continually being assembled and dismantled. Large blocks of ensemble sound can give way to smaller configurations, rhythmic density can evaporate into sparse gestures, and individual voices briefly emerge from the mass before being swallowed back into it. The piece breathes according to its own strange metabolism. This is where the title becomes apt. A waterfall suggests continuity and force, while steam suggests transformation, diffusion and instability. "Steam Waterfall" combines both conditions: a large body of sound constantly changing state. Nothing stays fixed for long, but neither does everything simply dissolve.

The most impressive achievement is perhaps that Nilssen-Love never seems particularly interested in demonstrating how clever the concept is. The concept serves the music rather than the reverse. The questions about authorship, duration and audience are embedded in the performance instead of being placed above it like an instruction manual. And that makes the final absurdity of those ping-pong balls strangely appropriate. After 75 minutes of negotiating composition, improvisation, collective responsibility and the boundaries of the concert, the ensemble arrives at something wonderfully primitive: objects bouncing around a room while 25 musicians and four dancers participate in the commotion. The grand philosophical question ends with physics.

Human beings, after all, remain remarkably complicated creatures for organisms that can be entertained by balls bouncing on a floor.
"Steam Waterfall" is therefore not simply an enormous improvisational performance. It is a study in collective attention, a composition that keeps asking how much control music actually needs before it becomes alive. Its answer is neither total freedom nor rigid authorship, but a precarious middle ground where instructions, intuition, accident and personality continually negotiate with one another.

The music survives that negotiation because the musicians listen. That may sound like a modest conclusion, but in a world increasingly obsessed with control, automation and predetermined outcomes, it has considerable weight. Here, structure creates the conditions for uncertainty, and uncertainty becomes the source of vitality.

The Unit is large. The music is larger still. And somewhere underneath it all, probably, a ping-pong ball is still bouncing.