Karoline Wallace - Eon (Sauajazz, 2026)

By Brian Earley

 

Alene. Voldsomt Alene.

 

Alone. Violently Alone. These are the lyrics highlighted by crescendo, volume, and underlined by Karoline Wallace’s celestial voice, in this case, a voice electronically transmuted to sound like Tuvan throat singing, at the apex of Eon’s opening track, “Tycho.” It turns out, much of Eon employs loneliness, separation, and uncertainty as lyrical motifs. But Wallace’s Norwegian text never collapses into isolation. Her opening musings in “Tycho,” named for the famous and complicated Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, marvel at the distant shining above us, Skapt i vill kraft, created by wild force. So much of the lyrical work by Wallace resounds with interior weather, the cosmos within that counters with enthusiasm the supernovas and aurora borealis without, the fiery and magnetic and kinetic elements of the universe that, like the imagination, contain the power to create and destroy.

 

What does it mean, after all, to be violently alone?

 

A wild, eternal roar iseach being. We are made of star stuff and ultimately whirl in oneness with the most distant corners of the universe. Oneness is never aloneness, and words like buldrer(roars),klinger(rings), andfunkler(sparkles) are as present as any other words of emphasis on this astral and exploding album.

And the music buoying these lyrics into the electric air is filled with a quiet simmering that always contains the potential to whip and whirl in fiery bursts and detonations at any second. Take, for example, what happens after “Tycho” quietly opens with Karl Bjorå’s sparse albeit off-center guitar strumming. As the music builds to its thunderous Alenecrescendo around the 3:30 mark, Martin Langlie begins smacking and slapping the cymbals with increasing excitement. A cello, played by Joel Ring, becomes more obviously audible. And out of the enveloping cosmic atmosphere emerges Signe Emmeluth’s alto saxophone that bursts through the spheres with noise and screaming, as it roars with presence. Emmeluth, it grows apparent, shadows Karoline Wallace’s ethereal vocal line from early on in this work. Only at this explosive point did I become aware of it, however. Wallace’s lonely voice was never alone, it turns out.

The album’s second song “Bittelille meg,” or Tiny little me, dances ahead blithely bouncing over a four note ostinato cello line Ring plays with joy and wonder.

 

Tiny little me, listeners are told in Norwegian, lives in a quiet house, but it’s not quiet inside me . “Klokkestein,” follows and calms down all the flaring effusion. Bjorå and Ring play a two note sequence over which Wallace’s vocal lines soar with soothing beauty.

 

This calm interiority is juxtaposed with outward ebullience throughout the entire album. Just listen to the second half of “Klokkestein,” as it shifts into a near house, EDM club track. Or better yet, turn to the wailing opening call of “Atlas,” a high point on the record, as it discharges around the one minute mark its wild energy into the exploding star half of this album always is. The song then proceeds for four minutes oscillating between fire music and the lonely call of evening somnolence, eventually crashing the two states together into one wall of sound.

 

“Karamellgneis,” a meditative work leading to the album’s hushed ending, is marked by up and down tuning and sliding mid-track by Bjorå’s guitar and Ring’s cello, and by Martin Langlie playing the banjo as Wallace reminds us Again and Again Again and Again We were…And we are again And will always be.

 

I have neglected to mention perhaps the core and mantle of Wallace’s project in Eon: geology. On the record’s inner sleeve Wallace writes “In this project, I am inspired by deep time—geological time. An eon is the longest unit of time in the geological timescale.” And, about “Karamellgneis” she writes gneiss “was formed by being pushed beneath the Earth’s crust…The heat and high pressure made it soft as caramel.” I rarely stop to remember that the natural state of rock is also caramel in texture, so accustomed I am to the unyielding formations in which I generally encounter them. But then again, the stars are tiny sparkles on clear evenings in my perception, and not the impossibly giant masses of nuclear fusion they are eons away in outer space.

 

Eon, Wallace’s third album as leader, is a master stroke of musical experimentation and cosmic poetry. Her lyrics and compositions manifest for listeners again and again that all is one, we are never alone, that large is small, quiet is noise, and what is far away is also intimately close. There is no need to feel sad for what has been lost to the past, and to live for anything other than the present moment. But even Wallace's very philosophy culminates in paradox as she ends the record with her father’s words: “It’s easy to say/Live for today,/When I tomorrow/Live for yesterday.” 

 

Karoline Wallace’s Eon can be found on Bandcamp: