Terje Rypdal

CD version. Conspiracy is a studio album of new music from the Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal, his first in the studio for about two decades. The years before had brought live recordings, many of them with orchestras. With a new quartet, named after the album, he reconnects with the electric energy of early ECM records such as Whenever I Seem To Be Far Away, Odyssey and Waves. The guitar is again at the centre, played with a rock improviser's taste for raw sound and a composer's sense of space.

The band spans three generations. Keyboardist Ståle Storløkken played on Rypdal's Vossabrygg and Crime Scene. Drummer Pål Thowsen returns to the label for the first time since Arild Andersen's groups of the 1970s, and the youngest member, Endre Hareide Hallre, plays fretless and Fender Precision bass. Rypdal wrote all six pieces. The quartet recorded at Rainbow Studio in Oslo in February 2019 with engineer Martin Abrahamsen. The mix followed in January 2020, and the production is credited to Manfred Eicher and Rypdal.

The pieces are compact, far from the long jams of the Odyssey years. The opener, As If The Ghost... Was Me!?, starts on crisp cymbals before Rypdal's singing Stratocaster tone slides in over Storløkken's keyboard washes. The title track is the hardest of the set, a turn back to his rock roots. By His Lonesome hands much of the space to Hallre's fretless bass. Baby Beautiful settles into a groove of brushed drums and Storløkken's Hammond organ. The brief Dawn closes the album in a dark, ambient haze of bowed tones and gongs.

In Rondo, Werner Stiefele heard a link to the sound of The Chaser and Blue. Mike Jurkovic in All About Jazz placed it among the high points of Rypdal's long catalogue. Graham Spry of London Jazz News wrote that Rypdal plays so that it is "virtually impossible to detect when composition ends and improvisation begins". For S. Victor Aaron at Something Else, the electric band without horns was a clear sign that he wanted to play jazz-rock again.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2658, first released on 11 September 2020.