Outland is the fifth album by the Norwegian trio Jøkleba and the first it made for ECM, released in October 2014. Trumpeter Per Jørgensen, keyboardist Jon Balke and drummer Audun Kleive have played together under that name since 1990, treating the group as a process rather than a fixed style. Here they work collectively with pulse, colour and texture in fourteen short, freely created pieces, with electronics, trumpet and voice in the foreground.

The name is built from the three surnames. Jørgensen plays trumpet, flute and kalimba and sings, Balke plays piano and electronics, and Kleive plays drums and percussion and adds electronics of his own. The music was recorded in May 2014 at Madstun and at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Kleive and Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineers. Kleive also mixed the album, Bob Katz mastered it, and the trio produced it themselves. Every piece is credited to all three players.

The titles point to books about the disintegration of identity, "the human mind when it gets lost", as Balke puts it. Bell Jar nods to Sylvia Plath, Blind Owl to Sadegh Hedayat and Horla to Guy de Maupassant. The Nightwood recalls Djuna Barnes, One Flew Over recalls Ken Kesey, and Laura Restrepo and Malcolm Lowry are also among the sources. The booklet reproduces art by Adolf Wölfli. Three brief pieces called Vridd open, divide and close the sequence. Blind Owl rests on a drone-like electronic backdrop. Beyond The Glass sets Jørgensen's melancholy horn against dark tonal colours, and on Brighton a heavily treated vocal line turns almost animal-like.

Critics stressed both the difficulty and the pull of the music. John Fordham wrote in The Guardian that the music suits free-improv listeners best. Still, he added, "its meticulous detailing and musicality do have an eerie seductiveness that reaches way outside that loop." In Jazz Journal, Fred Grand called the record "expressionistic, impulsive, forbidding, disorienting but beguilingly beautiful", and advised perseverance. For the Independent on Sunday, Phil Johnson singled out Beyond The Glass and The Nightwood as the most affecting pieces of his year,. The Free Jazz Blog, which gave it four stars, noted that the earlier records stood on a firmer rhythmic base. Here trumpet, piano and percussion seem to wander, yet the reviewer heard structure in them.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2413, first released in 2014.