Beauty Came To Us In Stone - Mungolian Jet Set
The Mungolian Jet Set have landed! After a four-year journey through time and space, Paul Strangefruit Nyhus, Reidar Skar and their crew have returned, bringing many treasures back for the less adventurous to savour.
Originally commissioned by Bugge Wesseltoft as a project reflecting Miles Davis's electric period of the late 1960s/early 70s, Beauty Came To Us In Stone has evolved from that basic premise into a Jazzland classic unlike anything anyone involved had anticipated.
It is the product of a collective that emerged from the stellar vault of Future Jazz, featuring Haavard Wiik, Paal Nilsen-Love, Ingebrigt Haaker Flaten, Bugge Wesseltoft, Jan Bang, Erik Honore, Knut Saevik, Knut Reiersrud, Paolo Vinaccia, Anders Engen, and Roger Ludvigsen.
With musical touchstones as diverse as Miles Davis and Brian Eno, Leftfield and Whigfield, Jimi Hendrix and David Hasselhoff, Radiohead and Portishead, it is clear that this is not a typical Future Jazz album.
Ranging from the immediately accessible (e.g. Navigator which will also be the first single from the album) to the dark and disturbing (e.g. The Ancient and The Innocent), the Mungolian Jet Set makes excursions into musical realms untouched by human ear, right off the map: "Here be dragons!"
The album begins with the burning rush of re-entering the stratosphere, hurtling towards the grounding of a beat beneath dualing keyboards, before relaunching through alien rapping, raunchy hard blues, Milesian jazz, atmospheric terror mixed with Zappaesque dry humour, manic DJ spins through the world of an Anime demon-cherub, ending with a return to the placid Earth. Our eyes have seen more through sound than we ever would have thought possible.
This is a journey not just into sound, but a journey somewhere many "intelligent dance music" producers forget exists: The Mungolian Jet Set journey into MUSIC.
"The album is a trip through imaginary spaces," says Nyhus. "We wanted to make an album that seemed to have been discovered in an elephants graveyard, a place where the great ideas that slipped just out of reach when when Teo and Miles were cutting loops to make Bitches Brew, or when Hendrix was visiting the Third Stone From the Sun. We wanted it to be everything that ISN'T in the photo, it is everything that made it worth taking a picture in the first place. This a longer look at a fleeting moment."
Fasten your seatbelt, hang on tight and travel through uncharted space with The Mungolian Jet Set.