This was Robin’s seventh actual CD release, but is a collection of music that he recorded between 1980 and 1985. The opening song “En Nat Pa Vaerket” is the oldest as well as the longest, and is more a collection of pieces that one pure long song with small breaks. It is only as the piece progresses that the dissonance and conflict that I expect from Robin starts to come through. This is very much an album where Robin is starting to stretch his musical ideas, which means that there is quite a lot more melody and proggy feel to the jazz – certainly quite different in many ways to what he started producing regularly in the Nineties and up to the present day. There is a larger concentration on keyboards within this number, but that isn’t the case throughout the album with some songs having no rhythm section at all and plenty of guitars, with a Gong/Hillage glissando style present at times.
Exciting and innovating, this album shows no sign at all of aging and even more than 30 years after the first song was recorded this is still invigorating and exciting and definitely a major part of Taylor’s canon and well worth investigating.
