Morten Lund and Andreas Eriksen took their adventurous 25 year Green Isac collaboration to a new level when they expanded the duo to a five member ensemble and rechristened themselves Green Isac Orchestra in 2015. Titled simply b a r, their second album as the full-fledged Green Isac Orchestra and the seventh Green Isac album overall, is a brilliant expression of their electro-acoustic blend of kinetic rhythms, inventive melodies, and organic soundscapes. The album releases today on Spotted Peccary Music in LP vinyl format and in 24-BIT AUDIOPHILE, CD QUALITY LOSSLESS, MP3 and streaming formats. All links: https://orcd.co/b-a-r

Rich with a generous helping of world-flavored percussion and minimalist textures, the music on b a r is a compelling and often energetic fusion of fourth-world rhythms with a progressive edge. The lively trans-continental grooves maintain a solid, forward motion throughout the dynamic moods and interludes of refined, wide-open spaces. Acoustic instruments including piano, cello, marimba and a variety of drums & percussion work in concert with live electronics such as synthesizers, mellotron, electric guitar, therevox, and gizmotron, to create a dynamic and inspired set of tracks that overflow with imaginative originality.

“Green Isac Orchestra is the extension of the duo Green Isac,” Lund explains. “It was put together in order to play live versions of Green Isac material, but soon the band started to make new music. Minimalist and ambient were the core ideas in the beginning, but on b a r there are several hints to prog.”

The album cover art is an image created by the Norwegian artist Nils Olav Bøe (http://www.omniweb.no/nob/), his imagery is sometimes of constructed urban and industrial landscapes, atmospheric and dreamlike miniature tableaus, often warping perceptions of dimensions and distances. “We feel there is a relation between Nils Olav Bøe’s artistic signature and our musical expression. The naked minimalism in his art suits us well.”

As a duo, Green Isac have always been known for the fresh and exciting recordings they created in the studio going all the way back to 1990. Now that the lineup has expanded to a quintet, the project has transformed into a living organism where the unmistakable Green Isac sound is developed and arranged with the musicians working together in a live setting, spontaneously crafting and refining their musical ideas through a process of realtime collaboration.

“Typically a small theme, rhythm, or soundscape is presented as a start point, and then the arrangements are made in rehearsals until we feel we are ready for recording.” says Eriksen. “It has been quite refreshing working together as a group in this way, and we have really been focused on listening and responding to each other. Hopefully this reflects in the music and makes it more alive.”

Tinted with the progressive hues of Eno, Tortoise, and King Crimson, b a r finds its home at the crossroads where West African polyrhythms meet the minimalism of Steve Reich and Nik Bärtsch. But whatever comparisons may come to mind, this iteration of Green Isac’s music is as unique, innovative, and refreshing as ever.

The album title b a r is a word with a lot of different meanings, variously: a long rod used as an obstruction, for fastening, or as a weapon; a counter where alcoholic drinks are served; a deposit composed of sand, silt, or pebbles in a river; a candy bar; to prevent someone from doing something or from going somewhere; a stripe with colors; a term for the legal profession; a line through a letter; a punctuation symbol; as well as specific nouns, family names and geographical designations. The album begins with some moments of power on the first song and settles into a calm meditative groove with a few climactic episodes blended in, creating some interesting dynamic tensions in the mix.

On the first track, bowed strings and tapped cymbals with exotic electronic spices make way for a journey into a somewhat dark wilderness landscape with primal geologic eruptions, a plethora of twists and turns into many interesting dimensions. This is probably the album’s most energetic track, “Volcanic” (7:47), a vast epic landscape that constantly morphs into a series of cycles, a glowing orange bubbling and simmering lava flow that suddenly bursts into a powerful crimson eruptions and then returns to the quiet lava flow.

Quietly emerging from darkness, slowly building patterns and details, featuring layered instruments, mainly piano and cello, peppered with acoustic percussion and keeping a meditative mood that slides into a beat, “Le Grand Sportif” (7:05) contains atmospheric displays of group interplay moving fluidly between musical worlds. No showy heroics or athletic power stunts as the title might somehow infer, this is a complicated uniquely magical marriage of the traditional to modern organic electronica, with incorporated elements drawn from classical, jazz, and world music.

“With Hat” (3:25) is a portrait of a subject keeping still and thinking about many things, the subtle facial expressions keep shifting while the subject appears to stay perfectly still. This is a delightfully understated picture of a person posing and allowing the music to illustrate moments of expanded interior mental and spiritual awareness and power, while the tempo is majestically slow and dignified.

Dawn breaks, I hear the cello embraced by intricate guitar layers and haunted by a changing range of pleasing surprises. A groove is established and then tweaked ever so slightly every so many measures, so that gradual changes add up to dramatic ones. “Don Progini” (7:03) ends with a burst of energy mixing of layers with distinctly foreshadowed build-up and release. The cycling theme weaves interpretations of a single theme above a steady rhythm, with a free-floating feeling that tends to find a different meaning everywhere it lands.

Oneiric is an adjective that describes things related to dreams and the fifth track has to me a nocturnal, spacey, dark and oneiric, perhaps an even more melancholic feeling. While showing respect for the old traditions, it is also willing to think along new lines. The title is “Aarwaaken” (6:10), which might translate from Dutch for “to watch.” The instrumental floats free, like a planchette moving over a Ouija board guided by many fingers, where everyone watches the pointer float in various directions but no one is quite sure how it gets there or what is doing the pushing. Darker, with a beat, visited by turns and layers, yes, this one is my favorite in this collection of some unusually fantastic songs.

The closer for the album is a second portrait of a subject, but this one is not standing still, now we are walking at a brisk tempo, enjoying a new morning, luxuriating in a sound that doesn’t tell you what to feel. “Without Hat” (5:50) mixes layers with a distinctly foreshadowed build-up and release, innovative, eclectic elements, large-scale experimentation, and the use of non-standard and unconventional sounds, instruments, song structures, playing styles, repetitive circular rhythms, ornamentation, the use of acoustic stringed patterns, the sense of beatific endurance, electronic treatments, sound manipulation and minimal hypnotic motifs. And then it ends abruptly.

The original duo known as Green Isac began with percussionist Andreas Eriksen and multi-instrumentalist Morten Lund, creating a changing sound that is always exploring electronics and technology blended with world music influences. On the Origo Sound label are their first two albums, Strings & Pottery (1991) where they began creating electronics and rhythms fusing bowed strings and pottery with vintage synths into a delightful ethnic stew, followed by Happy Endings (1997) an earthy blend of exotic strings and hand percussion. On the Spotted Peccary label their releases include Groundrush (2001), trance-dance ethno new age grooves, Etnotronica (2004), a world music flavored electronic dance masterpiece, Passengers (2014) has an exotic trancelike feeling, and their new sound, Green Isac Orchestra (2015), where the duo expanded to a five-piece ensemble, five people playing together and recording in the same room make the listening experience more alive, exhibiting fusions of styles, approaches and genres, involving a continuous move between formalism and eclecticism, assimilating some forms of almost classical music into the blend of ethnic and immersive atmospheres.

Ambient electronic means many things, much of the time the music is for listening, not dancing and there is no conventional melody or beat, or perhaps the cohesion is more about texture and exploration. Green Isac is known for fearlessly exploring rhythms and melodies from all around the globe, some dancing is allowed, some meditative trance music is included, on this new album there are feelings tapping into broader cultural resonances that connect to avant-garde art, classical music and folk music, performance and some harmonic language that was imported from jazz and 19th-century classical music. On b a r you will enjoy the rudimentary serialism and the instruments borrowed from world music and early music blended with new electronic musical instruments and technologies that transform the musicians’ ideas of what was possible and the audiences’ ideas of what is acceptable in music.

The album was recorded and mixed at Frydenlund Studio, in Oslo, Norway, where it was mastered by Lunds Lyd, and is available for physical purchase in LP vinyl format and in 24-BIT AUDIOPHILE, CD QUALITY LOSSLESS, MP3 and streaming formats. The LP version of b a r arrives in a factory sealed sleeve that includes vibrant artwork, liner notes, cover art by Nils Olaf Bøe, and exquisite package design by Daniel Pipitone. https://spottedpeccary.com/shop/bar/

Tracklist:
01 Volcanic 7:47
02 Le Grand Sportif 7:05
03 With Hat 3:25
04 Don Progini 7:03
05 Aarwaaken 6:10
06 Without Hat 5:50

About Green Isac:
Green Isac is a Norwegian-based duo featuring multi-instrumentalist Morten Lund and imaginative percussionist Andreas Eriksen. Together Eriksen and Lund blend electronic and ethnic instruments alike into kinetic rhythms, sometimes electronically fueled, and often acoustically driven, with accents from processed guitars and quirky synths, setting it all in otherworldly landscapes with an air of mystery and intrigue. In 2015 the Duo expanded their sound to include three additional musicians (Frode Larsen, Tov Ramstad and Jo Wang) leading to the latest project titled Green Isac Orchestra. https://www.greenisacorchestra.no/

About Spotted Peccary Music:
Portland-based Spotted Peccary Music is North America’s finest independent record label with a focus on deep, vast and introspective soundscapes. For over three decades, the artists of Spotted Peccary have been on a mission to develop, produce, publish and release ultra-high-quality, deep-listening experiences that engage the listener and exceed expectations. Every release is carefully prepared in a variety of high quality formats from MP3 to high-res studio masters. Explore more than 165 titles and 45 artists at www.SpottedPeccary.com and www.AmbientElectronic.com.

Links:
Spotted Peccary Album page: https://spottedpeccary.com/shop/bar/
Album Unboxing Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFyZ6qzyctI
Spotted Peccary Artist page: https://spottedpeccary.com/artists/green-isac/
Bandcamp: https://ambientelectronic.bandcamp.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spottedpeccary/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/user/spottedpeccary