about the record

Hans P. Kjorstad, a resident of Lillehammer, Norway, grew up playing folk music, taking up the fiddle at an early age before later finding his way to jazz, experimental music and beyond. Despite offering a broad palette, the ghost of folk music, in its verisimilitude and organic hues, remains within the compositional framework of Inn. Here, it is reduced to its bare elements through the alchemic introduction of microtonal synthesis, wonky looping and playful oddities that shift in tonal personality over the course of a piece.

Though a deeply subtle record, Inn is not as unassuming as its raw ingredients might imply. Kjorstad speaks of the record’s philosophy as “personal, but not self-conscious; hazy but not lazy; better to do it than to talk about it.” This curious modesty abounds throughout. Simple melodic lines layer and overlap in multicoloured combinations, like the meeting of different waters, each a sweet trickle, sometimes cool like a Scandinavian forest stream and sometimes warm like spring air. Deep listening reveals a secret world of beauty, poetry and colour.