Description
Rymden - Bugge Wesseltoft, Dan Berglund and Magnus Ostrom - return with their fourth studio album, Today May Be Tomorrow. Rymden's debut album, 2019's Reflections and Odysseys announced the long-awaited meeting of two great streams in modern European jazz: Wesseltoft's New Conception of Jazz and the Swedish bass-and-drums axis of e.s.t., with Berglund and Ostrom bringing their own history of power, precision, lyricism and volcanic live energy.
As with their previous albums, Rymden continue to maintain remarkable degrees of freedom and complexity. Time signatures shift, forms turn unexpected corners, and melodic elements weave through the music in ways that rarely take the obvious dominance they might be afforded by other artists. Yet none of this feels difficult for its own sake. Melody, rhythm, and texture are not hierarchically arranged so much as mutually entangled, each one underpinning, provoking, and illuminating the others.
Bugge Wesseltoft's piano and keyboards provide harmonic imagination, lyric intelligence, and textural depth; Dan Berglund's bass often seems to lead from the centre of the music, not merely anchoring but steering, singing, growling, and driving; Magnus Ostrom's drums, percussion and voices create weather systems of rhythm and colour, from rainfall brushes to explosive force.
Today May Be Tomorrow does not abandon the cosmos, the landscape, or the cinematic breadth of the trio's earlier work. Instead, it draws those elements inward and onward, into music concerned with time, return and transformation, while allowing the album title's darker resonance to remain present: the future is not guaranteed, and tomorrow is no longer something that can be taken for granted.
Available on 180g vinyl and digipak CD editions.
