Lucus is the second album by Time Is A Blind Guide, the acoustic group of Norwegian drummer and composer Thomas Strønen. It is the first in its slimmer quintet form. Released by ECM in January 2018, it brings in a new pianist, the Wakayama-born Ayumi Tanaka, and gives improvisation more weight than the group's 2015 debut did. The ensemble works as a string trio and a piano trio at once, and the music sits between chamber jazz, minimalism and contemporary composition.
Around Strønen and Tanaka are Håkon Aase on violin, Lucy Railton on cello and Ole Morten Vågan on double bass. Strønen first heard Tanaka while teaching in Oslo, and she had already stood in for Kit Downes at a few concerts of the first line-up. He wrote ten of the eleven pieces, while the opening La Bella is credited jointly to Aase, Vågan and himself. In ECM's notes he describes the scores as "guidelines", with less dependency on the written material than before. The album was recorded at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano in spring 2017, engineered by Stefano Amerio and produced by Manfred Eicher.
The Latin title means a sacred grove or a clearing in a forest, and the writing leaves a lot of open space for the players. La Bella starts with a softly rumbling drum pattern under bowed strings that rise and fall at the pace of breathing. The band's name comes from Anne Michaels' novel Fugitive Pieces. The track of that title grows from a melancholy Nordic string figure into a sound world closer to Japan. Tanaka has said she looks for that kind of link between the two countries when she improvises. Shorter pieces such as Baka and Islay are more abstract, and others, like Release, ebb and flow with the piano.
In DownBeat, where the album was an Editor's Pick, Bobby Reed called it "challenging, accessible and hypnotic". He heard in it jazz, folk, baroque, new music and traditional Japanese music. Writing in PopMatters in 2018, Andy Jurik heard the influence of post-minimalism in the more abstract tracks and summed the record up as "introspective yet not indulgent". Soundstage Ultra named it Recording of the Month.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2576, first released on 19 January 2018.
