Warp is the second solo album for ECM by the Norwegian pianist Jon Balke, nine years after Book of Velocities. Here the solo piano sits inside composed soundscapes that Balke calls "sound images": field recordings, electronic treatments and distant voices placed at the edges of the music. Most of the sixteen pieces are miniatures, and only one passes five minutes. Balke described the idea as a lone musician in his cloud of aesthetics meeting the world, or the world warping into his space.
The piano was recorded in September 2014 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer. Balke and Audun Kleive then recorded and processed the sound images at Madstun. A year later, in September 2015, the album was mixed at RSI Studio in Lugano with Stefano Amerio, and Balke's own field recordings went into the mix there. The singers Mattis Myrland and Wenche Losnegård appear as faraway layers, and Balke's daughter Ellinor Myskja Balke reads an announcement. Balke and Manfred Eicher produced.
The sources range from Oslo trams and a schoolyard to the resonance of a mosque in Istanbul. On Boodle the piano plays against what sounds like children at play, while Kantor is haunted by distant singing. On This Is the Movie dense, inventive layers of sound support a delicate reading of the theme. Bolide opens with force and then settles into a solemn, slow passage. The set is framed by Heliolatry at the start and a longer variation of it at the end, with two versions of Geminate placed in between.
Thom Jurek wrote on AllMusic that its "quark strangeness may prove a tad unsettling early on", before the record settles into a quietly compelling invitation. Robert Shore of Jazzwise, recalling Balke as the former leader of the Magnetic North Orchestra, heard a gently phantasmagorical experiment that shows "what a piano sounds like when it dreams aloud". For James Poore of MusicWeb International the most impressive track was Bolide, in a "robustly experimental approach to sound, music and space".
This is the CD edition, ECM 2444, first released on 12 February 2016, with support from Fond for lyd og bilde.
