Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Hans P. Kjorstad debuts on Phantom Limb (following works with Sam Gendel and Ernst Reijseger) with new album Inn, a nuanced, lower case, orchestra-in-miniature full of curiosity, charm, and sensitive mastery of its form.

Kjorstad - a resident of Lillehammer, Norway - grew up playing folk music, adopting the fiddle from an early age and later finding his way to jazz, experimental music, and beyond. And 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 by the alchemic introduction of microtonal synthesis, wonky looping, and playful oddities that shift in tonal personality over the duration 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 lay and overlay 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.

Hans P. Kjorstad is a musician and composer informed by Norwegian traditional music and experimental improvised music. His main artistic interest is to work towards an increased sensitivity to the sensual potential in subtle tonality changes: how do different tonalities influence what we see when we hear sound and what we hear when we see something? He performs solo, with ensembles, and for film and other audio-visual projects. Kjorstad has performed in some 30 countries, and has contributed to records issued by labels such as Leaving Records, Motvind Records, Talik, Hubro, SOFA, Drag City and others. He has toured and recorded with Sam Gendel, Ernst Reijseger, and Alasdair Roberts among others.