Anja Garbarek - The Road Is Just A Surface (The Original Full-length Theatrical Version) (2018)

Often erroneously compared to her Nordic contemporaries Stina Nordenstam and Björk, Norway's Anja Garbarek exists in a universe all her own. For years Garbarek has flown low under the radar and when her name has been plucked from near-obscurity it often resides in lazy journalism, which has often attached to hers the names of the aforementioned (and far more prolific) women as a point of reference. But while the Icelandic and Swedish songwriters, respectively, draw ideas from a deeply internal source of inspiration that often has them calling on their childhood designs, the Norwegian songstress prefers to explore the psychology of those outside of herself. Garbarek examines life from an impossibly uncongenial space that at once marks her as a detached voyeur and an involved conspirator.

After her 1992 debut Velkommen Inn, a Norwegian-language album of inoffensive funk-pop, the singer would return in 1996 with the surprising about-face that was Balloon Mood (2015). Full of sonic tricks that deliver mutated jazz and weirdly chopped hip-hop loops, Garbarek introduced to the world her English-language album featuring a set of noirishly fatalistic characters. It wouldn't be too surprising to learn that the singer's initial forays into the entertainment industry were those of an actress (she discusses this on her website); Garbarek parlayed her stage experience into characters whose peculiar actions and twisted desires were projected with the kind of scope that exists only for the theatre. Her music is often deceptively cool and composed, measured with an exactitude reserved for classical music. But stirring beneath the placid waves are the raucous emotions of a fevered storyteller, trying desperately to impart an often startling and vicious truth.

Garbarek continued with the eerily calm Smiling and Waving (2001) an orchestral exercise of minimalist dimensions that flirts only slightly with electronic beats and grooves. The album's vast, open spaces allows the singer to field her narratives with greater abandon, her lyrics stripped bare of the particular detail that marked Balloon Mood to allow a wider conjecture for interpretation. The slow, glacial orchestral slides reveal a more mature communication of sound which, in part, is the result of a collaboration with Talk Talk's Mark Hollis.

The pop-oriented Briefly Shaking (2010) redirects the Norwegian's elliptic narratives into a compressed package of juddering hip-hop beats, skewed North Sea jazz, and bonkers pop melodies for a more accessible outing. Briefly Shaking didn't bring her a wider audience, but it did expand her horizons of experiment, which inevitably (after a long-standing 12 years) led to her latest, The Road Is Just a Surface (Grappa Musikkforlag, 2018). An extension of a theatre piece created for the Bergen International Festival, it features Garbarek's usual stylistic tweaks with an even stronger leaning toward electronica. Her father, the notable jazz musician Jan Garbarek, lends his expertise to help shape these clockwork curiosities of shuffling electro-pop.

Released in two separate versions (one, a pared down and compact version of the album featuring traditional song structures, the other an expanded version which links the songs with experimental conceptual pieces), The Road Is Just a Surface doubles as a commentary on the theatre piece it was recorded for as well as a musical exploration of the deeply psychological studies in human behaviour the singer's work is known for. Listening to these songs, some of those concepts might glide right by you. Garbarek has an ear for delectable pop melodies and she delivers some of the most unnerving stories with a heavy dose of sugar. Take the cabaret dance-pop of "The Witness", which begins with rickety scrap-metal percussion before plunging into a seductive and rhythmic plod; the lyrics suggest the pain of watching, from afar, someone struggle to walk. In the metallic grind of "Bob's Song", Garbarek's heavily transmuted voice narrates the story of an unusual child. It's unsettling, emotional and, like much of her work, compelling in its visual detail.