PRESS TEXT

Nakama’s new studio album New World is the first album which features the band’s new line-up. Voice and violin has been replaced by the eminent woodwinders Andreas Røysum and Klaus Ellerhusen Holm; two gentlemen whose reed skills have led Nakama into uncharted sonic terrain. The record is released as a double LP/single CD and features 9 original tracks spanning a vast array of musical ideas.

New World is by and large an investigation in various ways of composing structures which is utilized as improvisational platforms — be it the rigid title track, which offers a spatial composition for the musicians to work around, or the much more straightforward Benign, leaving the soloist to roam freely. Half of the tracks have also been tampered with in post production, making New World a record with sturdy roots in a played-live feel, bending towards and intermingling with the tightness of computers, synthesizers and such. Add to that some buddhist Zen buddhist chants, bizarre bass riffs and some droplets of microtonality, then lo and behold: We have arrived. On one side the music is warm, explosive and eccentric and on the other it is tight, calculated and stringent. Still, Nakama is what it is: a chamber musical jazz like ensemble in a chill split between the free, catchy, experimental and contemporary.

New World offers new colors, new compositions and new adventures. Simply put, a New World.