Galant Galakse is a record that insists the cosmos is best understood not through telescopes but through duct-taped oscillators, rescued zithers, and the odd harmonica dragged through a black hole. Jørgen Træen and Stein Urheim, two Norwegians with an unholy amount of sonic toys, treat this album less like a set of tracks and more like a pair of interstellar expeditions where the laws of gravity have been mischievously rewritten.

If their first duo outing, "Krympende klode", was the shock of discovering a new planet, "Galant galakse" is the delight of colonizing it with unlikely flora and fauna. Across two extended pieces - "Pønskepause" and "Urpust" - they fold together modular burbles, cosmic hums, woodsy flutes, alien guitar voicings, and percussive shrapnel in ways that feel both anarchic and strangely coherent. One minute you’re in a medieval folk tune with a tamboura drone, the next you’re eavesdropping on Delia Derbyshire’s ghost arguing with Harry Partch’s instruments in a forest clearing.

It’s not “songs” we’re dealing with here, but long-form sonic narratives - elastic, unpredictable, full of interruptions that seem whimsical until you realize they were the point all along. The duo’s trick is balance: Træen’s electronics provide the magnetic field, Urheim’s strings and reeds the wandering comets, and together they keep your ears chasing unexpected orbits. Henry Kaiser briefly swoops in on guitar like a friendly meteorite, just to prove there’s always room for another eccentric body in this constellation.

There are no lyrics, but the album still “sings”. The instruments speak in tongues: a synth murmurs in binary prayer, a pocket trumpet wheezes like a drunken prophet, guitars slip into accents borrowed from continents that don’t exist. The voices of the galaxy are all here, just wearing new disguises.

The irony, of course, is in the title: this galaxy isn’t particularly “galant”. It’s awkward, messy, delightfully rude to convention - yet charming precisely because of its refusal to behave. Træen and Urheim aren’t writing a polite astronomical report; they’re doodling spirals in the margins of the universe and inviting us to get lost in them.

This isn’t background music for stargazing. It’s foreground music for falling headfirst into the stars and realizing, mid-spin, that chaos can be more elegant than order.