Parallax + Hytta – Strypetak

Improv/contemporary trio Parallax joins forces with Hardanger fiddle player Anne Hytta on their
second studio album, «Strypetak»: an acoustic meeting of the past, present, future and the timeless.
Somewhere in the distant future, four musicians gather around the hearth, playing the whispering and
crackling sound of a slått on a coarse wax cylinder in reverse.

«Our music draws on jazz, contemporary and folk music, and hovers uniquely somewhere in between
these traditions – a music in its own right.», says guitarist, Are Lothe Kolbeinsen.
«Strypetak» is composed by all four musicians in collaboration, and is an exploration of tangents and
contrasts between instruments and traditions. «In between» seems to be a keyword for the release: in
between genres, in between familiar and unfamiliar instrumental timbres, and in between expectations
and surprise on the part of the musicians:

«When I first bowed my fiddle with paper clips attached to the strings, I heard the sound of a lethargic,
rickety and helpless instrument. But then, inside all the racket, I found an oxymoronical beauty, like the
sound of a single surviving flower in a desolate crater. It had a captivating timbre, and I knew I had to
include it in the piece.», says fiddler Anne Hytta about the process.

And so, with paper clips, horsehair, precious wood and metal, Parallax+Hytta have forged a sonic
landscape full of color and texture, a journey that spans from a mere whisper to the thunderous. At
times the music is like a large organism that slowly wallows through the landscape, other times it is like
an insisting machinery – a scraping reminiscence of a derelict industrial plant.

In «Strypetak», Parallax and Anne Hytta have created a dense and nuanced piece of music that keeps
surprising – a unique sonic landscape which combines the beautiful, harsh, fragile and insisting you
never know what to expect. A distant melodic fragment, the sound of something familiar, but before
you know it the music has taken an unexpected direction.
«Strypetak» is out on Particular Recordings on LP and all streaming platforms.