Terje is a two-track EP by Swedish composer and improviser Alex Zethson. Featuring two movements from a score Zethson wrote for Victor Sjöström’s 1917 silent film, Terje Vigen, which was based on a poem by Henrik Ibsen, these beautifully poised compositions were premiered in Trondheim, Norway on November 20th, 2021, at Vår Frue Kirke (The Church of Our Lady). For this performance, which was recorded the day following the premiere, Zethson (on piano, synths and xylorimba) was joined by Ida Løvli Hidle (accordion), Christer Bothén (bass- and contrabass clarinets), Olav Luksengård Mjelva (Hardanger fiddle), and Trondheim vocal ensemble EMBLA, who were conducted by Ketil Jule Bjørnstad Belsaas. The final version of the pieces also includes additional vocals by Kristin Amparo Sundberg and trumpet by Goran Kajfeš. 

The score was written for EMBLA, which makes plenty of sense once you’ve delved deep into Zethson’s two compositions here – the vocal ensemble is the key to its shifting layers of tone, texture, and stark, melancholy melody. You can hear some threads woven from Zethson’s previous compositions, such as pole of inaccessibility (Thanatosis, 2016), Some of them were never unprepared (Relative Pitch Records/Thanatosis, 2021) and the beautiful, spiralling drones of Residy (SUPERPANG/Thanatosis, 2022). As with those mentioned pieces, Zethson is sure-footed in his compositional approach, but he leaves enough spaces for the listener to wind their own way through his work; each expression is an invitation to inhabit the contours of Zethson’s music, to find oneself lost in the shivery, almost haptic texturology that he seems intent on embracing.

But you can also hear some other connections, too, with Zethson’s folksy, open-ended improvisations with VÖ, where he’s joined by players like Johan Berthling, Leo Svensson Sander and Anna Högberg; and in the openendedness of the pieces, there are, perhaps, elliptical relationships with his ongoing engagement with avant-garde jazz, via his involvement with outfits like Ahanes, Tropiques, Angles, and Fire! Orchestra. This may help to explain the way Zethson weaves choral arrangements through both “Öja” and “Grimstad” with such flexibility and nuance; they are beautifully rendered here, performed with stately poise, but still very much alive and breathing, the choir’s collective voice lined with flesh, bold yet landing lightly in amongst the scrum of instruments that make up both pieces’ musical lattice. Amparo Sundberg joins in on “Grimstad”, another voice to further exposit Zethson’s statuesque lines.

“Öja” opens with determined, pulsing tones for gathered instrumentation, plotting out an architecture across which Zethson drapes EMBLA, the choir holding onto notes, and then swooping, ducking, and diving between the measures. It’s remarkable in its sureness of self. The elegant coda for piano in this composition recalls, fleetingly, the gentle sadness of Popol Vuh at their most reflective. “Grimstad” opens with a keening lament for Hardanger fiddle, before the choir sings a repeating, gently ascending melody, while Zethson folds together layers of quietly droning sound from his ensemble. Zethson’s work here seems to land in an in-between zone, one that perhaps shares similar tonality with a number of composers, from peers such as Marta Forsberg and Linnéa Talp, through the holy minimalism of Arvo Pärt, but his voice is very much his own, and Terje is one of his most confident articulations of that composerly voice yet.