The Swedish Gothenburg-based free-improvising Quagmire trio features Swiss-Swedish double bass player Nina de Heney, hyper-pianist Karin Johansson, and drummer Henrik Wartel. This trio released its debut self-titled album in 2019 on the Portuguese label Creative Sources, highlighting its imaginative layering of spontaneous, sound-oriented textures with an array of inventive extended bowing, inside-the-piano, and percussive techniques that soon coalesced into instant, haunting compositions.
Rörane was recorded at the isolated, old barn Rörane Studio and performance space in Bohuslän by Andreas Werliin (the ex-drummer of Fire! trio), and features the legendary local bass and contrabass clarinetist Christer Bothén (b. 1941), known for his collaboration with Don Cherry (he taught Cherry the donso n’goni), and for his new band Cosmic Ear (with Mats Gustafsson and Goran Kajfeš). Bothén also did the cover artwork.
The album was recorded during a short tour of this ad-hoc quartet. The Rörane area, with its rich cultural history, rock carvings, nature reserves, and burial grounds, offered the right atmosphere to immerse oneself in the spirit of the place. The five pieces deepen the nuanced interplay of Quagmire, enjoying the organic, emphatic, and profoundly poetic contribution of Bothén. Each piece suggests its own unpredictable sonic landscape and its own mysterious, acoustic mantras, flirting with the otherworldly, electroacoustic sounds, or disorienting, statis-like textures. Bothén pushes Quagmire into urgent interplay at the beginning of the 19-minute title piece, but soon the quartet’s dynamics gravitate into the more lyrical and introspective. And since then, breath, bow, strings, skins, and cymbals dance in an inspiring, delicate way, allowing themselves to push their common sonic palettes gently and invite the listeners to immerse themselves in the deeply spiritual musical universe of Qugamire and Bothén. You may feel that the ancient spirits Rörane had some part in this beautiful, arresting sonic ritual.
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