Album Review: Sagara by diskJokke

This third album from quietly prolific Norwegian producer Joachim Dyrdahl was inspired, in a somewhat roundabout way, by a trip he took to Indonesia to fulfill a 2009 commission for a new work; not, as originally envisioned, by the time he spent with a Javanese gamelan group, whose music he'd planned to intermingle with his own electronic dance stylings, but rather by a final week in Bali which, he reported, "changed his perspective on music forever. " Certainly, Sagara seems to stem from a decidedly different set of impulses than the pair of party-friendly, groove-oriented Diskjokke albums that preceded it. Although it shares the same undeniable warmth and good feeling that have marked his work all along, it ventures into entirely new stylistic territory: languid, almost entirely beatless ambient music, or, you might say, new age.

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So far, Oslo-based producer diskJokke (Joachim Dyrdahl) has been the best kind of anonymous: a producer beholden to a genre (space disco) who consistently pumps out tidy, form-fitting jams. His music is defined as much by its constraints-- self-imposed, mostly-- as by its content (that he has worked as a mathematician makes perfect sense). But here, Dyrdahl has strays from the strictures of beatific electronic music in favor of tone-poem ambience.

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Aaron Goldberg and Guillermo Klein Jazz doesn’t have many great albums featuring two pianists, and the rare examples tend to be mano-a-mano affairs, one virtuoso facing another on equal terms. So “Bienestan,” due out on Sunnyside on Tuesday, is exceptional in more than one sense. It’s the work of Aaron Goldberg and Guillermo Klein, pianist-composers with a friendship going back 20 years, when they were both students in Boston.

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