**Screen printed edition of 300 hand-numbered copies. High-quality open screen printed sleeve, and heavy outer screen printed PVC sleeve. Comes with a bonus CD** For their third album Jukwaa expands to a quintet : 1 piano, 2 double-basses, 2 drums. This exceptional instrumentation led to an exploration and investigation of the instruments themselves, their roles and their timbral range. «Jukwaa embodies a central paradox of today’s modern music: the double bass is a bass and not a bass, the drums are drums and not drums, the piano is a piano and not a piano», writes Norwegian master double bass player Håkon Thelin in his liner notes. The six-part «Cushion» is structured like a suite and Thelin adds that it may, unconsciously, flirt with the concept of being «radically idiomatic» – the concept where the instrument/musician/improviser combination itself, in all perspectives from ergonomic to historical, becomes the «material» from which music is shaped.

.

Resonating metal waves, muffled piano strings, a throbbing pulse, rotating surfaces and repetitive motifs are some of the ingredients used to construct a wildly varied compendium of sounds and atmospheres, swaying from the organic to the mechanical, from open to dense, from conventional use to extended techniques. The end result is a challenging conception that opens up a can of possibilities, of which you get quite a few on Cushion. - Guy Peters