"Oddments" is a fitting title for Rosa Ensemble’s debut on Cuneiform Records, though “odd” here should not be mistaken for awkward. It’s odd like a dream where a trombone argues with a drum kit in Morse code while a guitar slips into math-rock gymnastics, only to be interrupted by a percussionist who seems to be stirring soup with mallets. Each fragment on this record feels like a shard from a larger, ungraspable mosaic - eighteen miniatures that play with genre, gesture, and expectation like cats batting at loose strings.

The Dutch ensemble has been blurring categories since its founding in 1997: starting with contemporary classical seriousness, then happily derailing itself into multimedia theater, absurdist cabaret, Beefheart tributes, and collaborations with pop eccentrics like Spinvis. On "Oddments", now a quintet featuring musicians with terrifyingly wide résumés - John Dikeman’s free-jazz sax, Koen Kaptijn’s trombone-as-noise-machine, Jeroen Kimman’s anything-goes guitar arsenal, Mei Yi Lee’s restless percussion, and Peter Jessen’s bass grounding it all - the group returns to something deceptively “small”. Instead of grand productions, we get a collection of bite-sized compositions from Floris van Bergeijk, Jeroen Kimman, and Wilbert Bulsink. Each track is a tiny organism, a lab sample that twitches, mutates, and occasionally self-destructs in under two minutes.

The humor is part of the design. Tracks called “muzak (beginners)” and “muzak (gevorderden)” wink knowingly at the cheap background genre while sounding like it’s been disassembled by dadaists with soldering irons. “Hoempa” feels like a carnival band hijacked by free improvisers, while “Naaiman” has the nervy precision of a sewing machine going off script. And then there’s “Tedjes blues”, which is barely a blues at all, more like the ghost of one, half-remembered and played through a cracked megaphone.

But amid the jokes and jolts, there are moments of disarming beauty. “Slaapwankel” (literally “sleep-walk”) drifts with a kind of tender unease, half lullaby, half disoriented stumble through moonlight. “Nachtmuziek” brushes against something almost classical in its restraint, before slipping back into Rosa’s signature twilight of the absurd.

What makes "Oddments" remarkable is how these pieces never feel like mere sketches or leftovers. Instead, the album revels in the fragmentary, asking the listener to embrace incompleteness as a form of wholeness. It’s a collage aesthetic - part Erik Satie’s sardonic brevity, part Captain Beefheart’s fractured logic, part downtown New York improv scene - but filtered through Dutch wit and precision.

Rosa Ensemble, after nearly three decades of restless reinvention, prove that seriousness and silliness are not opposites but co-conspirators. "Oddments" is playful, unpredictable, and gloriously unclassifiable: a cabinet of sonic curiosities where every drawer reveals another strange delight.