Økse: Onwards (Keep Going)
Økse: Onwards (Keep Going)
The quartet fuses free jazz with experimental hip-hop on their phenomenal debut album
Økse is the Danish word for axe – an apt name for a free jazz band, right?
As drummer Savannah Harris explains to me over Zoom:
“In various spiritual traditions, the axe is a vehicle for liberation, but it can be a protective and grounding tool as well. I’m Jamaican – remember Bob Marley, big tree, small axe? The name is kind of punk. We like that.”
A couple of weeks earlier, I find myself at A L’Arme, a festival for experimental and improvised music in Berlin. Opening up on Friday night, Økse perform their new material in front of an actual crowd for the first time.
The rhythm section – Harris on drums and Petter Eldh on double-bass – provides a steady, almost shamanic groove, while Mette Rasmussen conjures shrill overtones from her alto saxophone, and Val Jeanty adds strange noises and frequencies from turntables and other electronic devices.
I realize that sounds quite sober, but there’s magic happening on stage.
Back home that night, I look up the band and buy their debut album, which has just been released that day. I’m surprised that it actually contains vocals: Released on Backwoodz Studioz, an independent label that the revered New York rapper Billy Woods set up more than 20 years ago, four of the eight songs feature some of my favorite MCs from the current hip-hop underground (Woods, Elucid, Maassai and Cavalier).
When I reach out to a contact on the label website to find out more about the project, Woods writes me back almost immediately and connects me with Mette Rasmussen. Our Zoom call happens some weeks later, due to her hectic schedule.
“Økse is an evolving band, a living organism”, she says, and Harris adds: “We wanted it to be this open and free space where everyone's ideas had weight and could morph into anything. Every single person in Økse is so open musically. Everyone loves rap. Everyone loves jazz and free improvised music. Everyone loves Afro-Cuban music, Brazilian music, classical music.”
The genesis of the band goes back to 2022’s Jazzfestival Saalfelden in Austria. Rasmussen had invited Harris to play a commissioned concert together. Jamming in New York to compose material for the mutual show, they realized they wanted to open this project up to other voices.
The first person they invited to contribute was Petter Eldh, a Swedish bassist, synthesizer and MPC freak based in Berlin. Eldh has been fusing ideas from jazz and hip-hop for a long time, and both Rasmussen and Harris had enjoyed working with him before. Asking him to join was a no-brainer.
To complete the lineup, they added Val Jeanty, a renowned Haitian turntablist, electronic music producer and lecturer at Berklee College of Music. The “sound chemist” in Økse, her presence is felt through the most out-there, otherworldly manipulated sounds, whether it’s a native sample from Haiti, or some ancient pipes from Scotland, or an obscure recording from the north of Norway.
The last piece of the puzzle was the Backwoodz connection. It started when Mette Rasmussen met Billy Woods in a small town in Switzerland, where they both played the same festival stage.
“He heard me play”, she recounts. “He’s looking for samples all the time, so he was like, ‘Send me some stuff.’ Two weeks later, I sent him a track that Petter and I were working on. From there, it evolved naturally. He came to Trondheim, which is where I live, and we recorded in New York, at [Backwoodz in-house producer] Willie Green’s studio, The Greenhouse. The whole Backwoodz family became a huge influence on this record.”
For Woods, working with Økse is not an unusual turn. On his recent albums you’ll find radical, free jazz-inspired rap songs such as “Haarlem”, “Swampwater” or “Blue Smoke”. He also recorded a full album with Moor Mother, vocalist in Irreversible Entanglements, a group on the forefront of the recent revival of free and spiritual jazz.
“I grew up on hip-hop”, Savannah Harris says. “My first touring experience was with a rap group. Culturally, I feel like rap and jazz have such a symbiotic relationship. Other bands have worked with MCs before us, but I think we found a fresh way to tackle that collaboration between genres.”
Økse’s music does indeed provide a fresh perspective on that matter, without ever resorting to the tropes and clichés of ‘jazz rap’. If you’re looking for easy-listening boom-bap with ‘soulful’ sax samples, look elsewhere. Økse plays wild and challenging music, not lean-back playlist fodder.
The rappers clearly understood their mission to not just plainly “rap over a beat”, but to use their distinctive voices and styles like instruments in a composition, answering to musical calls from within the group.
"I was really excited when Woods first told me about Økse and the project while it was in development”, rapper Cavalier states. “Mette reached out and shared what she enjoyed about my style and I could tell she actually checked me out.”
Like Elucid and Maassai, Cavalier is part of the Backwoodz clique and released one of the most lauded indie rap albums of the year. When he came to the studio to record his feature part for Økse, he had to run off to a photoshoot in between sessions.
“Not sure what to expect, I came in that morning and the energy was already buzzing. Val and Petter started to hit some kind of groove off of a loop Val cooked up and I just KNEW that would be the backbone to the song we were going to cook up.”
Cav left the studio and headed to the shoot with that loop on headphones, returning later to finish his verse.
“Mette's sax line haunted me like a vocalist crying out and the whole track had a driving rhythm to it, I came in right where she left off and it all just seemed to line up. The best songs in my opinion happen this way, a progression and unfolding of the known and unknown, just like the world we as artists are always trying to capture.”
With Økse, nothing seems to follow a pre-determined plan – it’s a spontaneous series of collaborative energy outbursts. And while the material was created in an intuitive process without much thinking and planning ahead, there’s still a magical thread woven throughout the group’s phenomenal debut album.
One of the record’s key tracks is “Amager” – a frantic live drum’n’bass track reminiscent of Roni Size’s Reprazent project, with a furious verse from label boss Billy Woods.
Woods had originally pre-written a verse over the music, but when he touched down in Trondheim to work with Mette for 24 hours before going on an European tour, he got stopped and harrassed by Norwegian custom officials.
“Mette was waiting for me and I told her what went down. I remember how angry she was, and I was angry too, but it was an old ache, like when a bad knee is acting up”, Woods writes in the blurb for “Amager”.
On their way to the studio, he decided to scrap the planned verse and rewrite it from scratch. He felt the urge to write about this experience of institutionalized, systemic racism.
“I remember driving alongside the Fjord, looking at this beautiful alien landscape, as she alternately apologized and fumed. I felt so peaceful looking out that window. I also had that energy that comes when the cops try and violate but you know you are good and you are watching them get madder and madder, feeling like Cam’Ron wagging a finger at Bill O’Reilly. […] I think because it was an experience that was both familiar and new, I wanted to tap into that while it was still very present in my mind and body.”
Media Diet
Listening: Poppy H – Wadham Lodge (2024)
I’ve been banging the drum for this prolific DIY musician ever since I fell for their gorgeous album Grave Era back in February.
produces murky ambient beats on broken instruments; fragmentary melodies and ghostly voices rise from a thick fog of strange noises and metallic pulses. Wadham Lodge reminds me of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s surreal fever dreams, which I happen to love. Headphone music, but not for the faint of heart.Reading: Zoë Bernard – The perfect escape from our online world (Vox, 2024)
Excellent article on the resurgence of analog media – flip phones, vinyl records, cassette tapes, printed magazines and the likes – and the growing desire to live our lives more offline.
“Going offline is a form of luxury,” said Sean Thielen-Esparza, an entrepreneur who designs tech interfaces. “It’s this idea that you can signal luxury or status and be different from the masses by gatekeeping, by being in in-person networks, by quieting down.” For knowledge workers who spend most of their time on computers, spending time away from the internet is increasingly considered a privilege.
[via
’ Network Notes]Watching: Pia Frankenberg – Nie wieder schlafen [Never sleep again] (1992)
Three women spend long nights in Berlin – this German indie film captures the excitement about the city shortly after the Wall came down, before decades of gentrification and urban development destroyed its allure. If you don’t speak German, you’ll need subtitles switched on.
[streaming on Mubi]
ØKSE album is great!
Cheers for continuing to bang that drum Stephan - means a lot to me.