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The resurgence of European nationalism might make one a little weary to hear the first self-titled album by Aksiom through a regional, Nordic, cultural lens, but the remarkably thoughtful curation and cohesion of the album deserves some comment regarding its documentation of a regional style. The album showcases two composers from Norway: Øyvind Mæland, who recently premiered his opera Ad Undas – Solaris Korrigert at the Norwegian Opera, and Martin Rane Bauck, who co-founded Aksiom in 2010. The other two composers on the album are both from Sweden: Johan Svensson, artistic director of the ensemble Mimitabu, and Lisa Streich, recently awarded the Rome Prize to live in Villa Massimo through 2017. Aksiom describe themselves in these geographical terms in their liner notes as well: ‘The ensemble, originating from the Norwegian Academy of Music, works mainly with new Nordic music and improvisation’. Under the direction of Kai Grinde Myrann, Aksiom’s main core of nine interpreters includes flute, saxophone, trombone, percussion, piano, guitar, violin, cello, and contrabass. Though the album might have thrown together several disparate and uncoordinated pieces under a regional banner, the pieces chosen for the album inhabit a shared timbral space, a generally dark muted hue without many spontaneous soloistic outbreaks. The pieces also share a formal sensibility – no urgent sense of development, but a rising series of waves of small, increasing climaxes in each piece, which give the entire listen as a whole a strong sense of unity and interconnectedness. Throughout all four pieces, bright timbres emerge spontaneously like sunlight poking through the vantage point of cracks in a dark cave. As listeners, we seem to be crouched in dim, humid timbres, looking up and waiting for soft passes of light to shine through at dramatic punctuations. Even the cover design of the album seems to run every image through a prism into red, white, and blue, as if the photographs of the composers and interpreters have been refracted through moisture in the atmosphere above, as it shines underground. The above is admittedly a poor analogy for the music – in Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, higher register woodwinds and strings and brighter timbres emerge as we drive towards the climax, yet we don’t have the feeling we are burrowing out of the cave toward the sky, we are digging deeper and striking at precious and shiny metals, nearly striking gold or encountering the guardian that protects it. Johan Svensson’s Shiver, the first track of the album, has this same sense of digging down. The percussion, and the percussive effects from the other instruments, have the irregular continuity of miners hammering and drilling down into a mine, working through tough, hard batches of rock and sometimes surfacing something reflecting light. But like a miner digging for coal, they are not looking for, or developing toward, something shiny. They are simply mining, breaking up rocks, pressing their bodies against the generally unpredictable but rhythmic machines bouncing against the rock floors and walls, seemingly by chance unearthing some lustrous material. Papirosn, the second track, composed by Lisa Streich, opens up a more delicate melodic and harmonic space – the guitar foreshadows brief piano and trombone outbursts, underpinned by slow contrapuntal movement in the strings. The least developmental piece on the album, and furthermore the most restful in the space it has established, the work nonetheless invests deeply in the hard-won consonances at its end. The tempo, texture, and gentility inform the breadth of the pieces around it as a whole. The guitar especially defines the space we are in with its roaming stereo articulations. Stine Janvin Motland’s voice enters immediately on Øyvind Mæland’s Étude Ralentissante, the third track, well-placed at nearly the golden mean of the entire listening experience. The quaver ostinato patterns in the vibraphone, flute and strings put in work, carrying and cradling the voice, like a minecart, bringing Motland’s voice higher and higher, pressing against tensions in the ceiling of the sonic space. She sometimes matches the timbres of her accompanying TEMPO 71 (281) 99–106 © 2017 Cambridge University Press 99