Finn Loxbo — guitar
Lisa Ullén — piano
Vilhelm Bromander — double bass
Ryan Packard — percussion
Direction in music by Finn Loxbo.
Recorded 6 May 2022 by Magnus Lindgren at the Royal College of Music, Stockholm.
Mixed by Magnus Lindgren.
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung, Bonn.
Photography by Erik Viklund. Design by John Chantler.
This release has been supported by Kulturrådet, The Swedish Arts Council.
Ephemeralds is the first recording by Finn Loxbo’s new ensemble Kommun and marks a distinct development in the guitarist’s compositional practice. Performing together with pianist Lisa Ullén, kontrabassist Vilhelm Bromander and percussionist Ryan Packard, Loxbo has set up a situation of intense focus, dissolving individual identities into a collective sound world of resolute clarity. Each musician manipulates a collection of tightly stipulated pitch material whilst bringing the shared timbral qualities of each instrument into close proximity. Uniquely, this dissolution of identity happens without relying on a blur of sustained tones. The music remains hard. A chiselled, gleaming beauty, but one hung in a precarious assemblage of rhythmic co-dependence. With Ephemeralds, the act of listening both invokes and displaces our memories, phrases and combinations slip away at the very point they coalesce creating a feeling of simultaneous movement and suspension-in-place where everything happens in the moment of nothing really happening and nothing happens in the moment of everything happening.