Liner notes, Countryside

"I sat completely still for several minutes after having listened through this album, completely captivated by an entirely other musical universe. Easy to enter, I thought, yet so hard to leave. I knew I had just experienced something quite unique, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. After a while, it came to me, as I tried to capture the essence of the total experience.

To start with, the material quality of Frøy Aagre’s music, as compositions of lines and shapes, strikes me as being transparent textures of carefully woven threads of sound – a polyphonic interplay of such poetic integrity and artistic conviction that the expressive intentionality of the music is never questioned. While listening, I found myself often nodding with a smile at the many unexpected, yet nature-like organic turns in the flow of musical events. Frøy Aagre speaks to the listener in a very personal language, and her line of thoughts, and rhetorical eloquence, is felt to be able to go anywhere on any level at any time. Like the contour of the the horizon in the countryside. Her sensibility to stylistic references seems wide open, not committing herself to the aesthetical preferences of any given style, but all the while creating a convincing and total expression which is all her own. Would I call it jazz? Possibly – but it’s Frøy Aagre’s jazz.

Out of the carefully controlled structures of the composed music, there emerges improvised sections that seem equally clear-minded, yet unmistakably intuitive and artistically credible. The transition between these two creative mindsets – the one composing “out of time” and the other performing “in time” - is sublime and sophisticated, almost undetectable at times. This, to me, is a clear indication of a very mature composer, in her ableness to convert her improvised intuitive musical ideas into structured dots and lines notated in her scores. Yet this is no mere stream of conciousness, but rather a well structured architectural design of intergrated musical gestures, forming unified compositions rather than a continuum of spontaneous inventions.

It is also clear that Frøy Aagre knows how to pick her fellow musicians, as there is never any doubt that they are finely attuned to her artistic nuances. Andreas Ulvo, Audun Ellingsen, and Freddy Wike, on piano, bass, and drums, respectively, respond perfectly to complement the colour and shapes, and the expressive ambience, of her compositions. As does the recorded production as well, with its crystal clear sound picture, and a live-like balance of the various levels of spatial depth, as though a live performance is taking place right then and there.
- Bjørn Kruse