Strange Hands - Eivind Aarset
Eivind Aarset’s new album "Strange Hands" finds his long-running quartet in restless, luminous form. Joined by violinist Sara Övinge and Mira Thiruchelvam on pullankulal, with Bjarne Stensli capturing and sculpting the sound, Aarset, Audun Erlien, Wetle Holte and Erland Dahlen expand their shared vocabulary into something at once leaner and more unpredictable. The music feels closer to the bone: fewer obvious adornments, more direct impact, yet still bathed in the shifting light and shadow that have made Aarset’s records so uncannily cinematic.
Where earlier albums often pushed the guitar into pure abstraction, this one lets recognisable strings, wood and skin step forward without surrendering the hallucinatory edge. Övinge’s violin and Thiruchelvam’s pullankulal don’t sit on top of Aarset’s world; they are woven into it, bending the harmonic perspective, colouring the air around the drums and bass. Across the record, composed material and open improvisation are treated as equal forces: riffs collapse into texture, textures snap into song, and the band’s shared sense of timing and space does as much storytelling as any solo.
The opening track, “Snow Crash”, sets the tone: clipped, futuristic figures spark against an insistent backbeat, nudged steadily towards something closer to indie rock. Melodic guitar fragments fray at the edges, the groove glitches and splinters, then reforms. A mid-track break for chiming, almost gamelan-like percussion resets the ear before the band drives the piece back into a more rugged, electrified terrain, ending in a kind of echoing, other-planetary cloister.
On “Strange Hands”, the mood turns towards slow-burn tension and sideways motion. A dark, steady bass figure keeps the path straight while guitar slides around it in sinuous lines, melodies that seem to circle rather than resolve. The atmosphere is thick, nocturnal; there is a sense of being followed, or of sensing movement just beyond one’s peripheral vision. It’s a quietly gripping piece, deepening the album’s sense of unease and fascination, as if the music were guided by unfamiliar hands that somehow still know the way.
With “Slumberjack”, the group leans into an atmospheric, almost indie-rock sensibility. A simple, emotive figure unfurls over patient drums and bass, carrying a faint sense of remembered roads and late-night travel. The structure is quietly dramatic: the song gradually deconstructs itself into scattered tones and fragments, then rebuilds in a new configuration, as if re-writing its own emotional logic in real time.
“Deep Green” opens on a taut, breath-held landscape. Aarset's guitar and Övinge’s violin trace a nocturnal song that feels both intimate and remote, like something overheard through trees. When Thiruchelvam’s pullankulal enters, the horizon lifts: the music tilts from solitude toward something radiant and wide-eyed, joy and awe folded into one rising arc. Aarset’s guitar moves in and out of focus – sometimes plainly a guitar, sometimes dissolving into timbres that could be synth, strings or an unknown instrument entirely – until the plaintive guitar returns to guide the piece towards a calmer, brighter canopy.
“Space BOB” lets a streak of humour in without ever undercutting the intensity. A lopsided, almost cartoonishly stubborn riff hints at funk and blues while refusing to settle into either. The music sprawls outward, chord patterns wandering in unexpected directions before locking into a propulsive space-rock drive. Underneath the cosmic swirl, Erlien’s bass and the dual drummers maintain a relentless forward motion, giving the track a narrative urgency even at its most chaotic.
The closing “What Drifts Below” arrives almost weightless: hushed pulses and soft-focus harmonies slowly gather around a barely stated melody, guitar and violin consorting in the soundscape. Layers rise and fall like a tide; what begins as an underwater murmur gradually reveals itself as a clear, singing line without ever breaking the spell of suspension, as if the music were feeling its way forward by touch in the dark. It fades like a final slow stroke, leaving ripples in its wake.
As ever, Aarset’s music triggers images as much as it does analytical listening. Each piece feels like a short film with its dialogue removed, leaving only the light, the angles and the cuts. Long-time listeners will recognise his fingerprint immediately – the way electronic treatment and acoustic touch are folded together so tightly that they become one instrument – but there is also a sense here of the palette being refreshed, of new colours and shapes being discovered within a familiar language.
We’ve been playing together in this band for many years, and over time a sound has grown out of that – something that feels like our own, built on a shared sense of musical aesthetics. On this album I wanted to explore that more, but also gently push at the edges of it, to see where the music might go next. If we recognise the feeling of ‘we’ve been here before’, that’s the signal to turn and go another way instead. Most of the choices we make in the studio are intuitive – we follow what sounds and feels right. In the end, the aim is simple: to make music that feels fresh to us, that we respond to emotionally, and that we’re happy to play again.
The music itself always teaches us what comes next.
Eivind Aarset
Perhaps the most striking realisation, once the last note has faded, is that what defines Aarset’s work is not the technology at his feet but the choices at his fingertips: his clean tone, his phrasing, his instinct for exactly where a note should begin and end. The effects, the textures, the elaborate sound design remain vital, but they serve a player whose identity would be unmistakable even with nothing but a cable, a guitar and an amplifier. "Strange Hands" underlines that fact with quiet confidence, adding another distinct chapter to a body of work that continues to grow more coherent, more exploratory, and more deeply his own.
NB: pullankulal is an instrument similar to a bansuri.