The Mungolian Jet Set have landed! After a four-year journey through time
and space, Paul “Strangefruit” Nyhus, Reidar Skar and their crew have
returned, bringing many treasures back for the less adventurous to savour.
Originally commissioned by Bugge Wesseltoft as a project reflecting Miles
Davis’s electric period of the late 1960s/early ‘70s, “Beauty Came To Us
In Stone” has evolved from that basic premise into a Jazzland classic
unlike anything anyone involved had anticipated.
It is the product of a collective that emerged from the stellar vault of
Future Jazz, featuring Håvard Wiik, Paal Nilsen-Love, Ingebrigt Haaker
Flaten, Bugge Wesseltoft, Jan Bang, Erik Honore, Knut Sævik, Knut
Reiersrud, Paolo Vinaccia, Anders Engen, and Roger Ludvigsen.
With musical touchstones as diverse as John Coltrane and Miles Davis,
Leftfield and Whigfield, Brian Eno and David Byrne, Captain Beefheart and
Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix and David Hasselhoff, Radiohead and Portishead,
it is clear that this is not a typical “Future Jazz” album.
Ranging from the immediately accessible (e.g. “Navigator” – which will
also be the first single from the album) to the dark and disturbing (e.g.
“The Ancient and The Innocent”), the Mungolian Jet Set makes excursions
into musical realms untouched by human ear, right off the map: "Here be
dragons!"
The album begins with the burning rush of re-entering the stratosphere,
hurtling towards the grounding of a beat beneath dualing keyboards, before
relaunching through alien rapping, raunchy hard blues, Milesian jazz,
atmospheric terror mixed with Zappaesque dry humour, manic DJ spins
through the world of an Anime demon-cherub, ending with a return to the
placid Earth. Our eyes have seen more through sound than we ever would
have thought possible.
This is a journey not just into sound, but a journey somewhere many
"intelligent dance music" producers forget exists: The Mungolian Jet Set journey into MUSIC.
“The album is a trip through imaginary spaces”, says Nyhus. “We wanted to
make album that seemed to have been discovered in an elephant’s graveyard,
a place where the great ideas that slipped just out of reach when when Teo
and Miles were cutting loops to make Bitches Brew, or when Hendrix was
visiting the Third Stone From the Sun, or when the Floyd visited the Dark
Side of the Moon. We wanted it to be everything that ISN´T in the photo,
it is everything that made it worth taking a picture in the first place.
This a longer look at a fleeting moment.”
Fasten your seatbelt, hang on tight and travel through uncharted space
with The Mungolian Jet Set.
“Beauty Came To Us In Stone”
