Elephant9: Mythical River

Although Elephant9's plugged-in lineage includes the usual suspects—Miles Davis' electric bands and Soft Machine—the Norwegian organ trio's tap root is unmistakably planted in the work of the late British musician Keith Emerson, keyboards player with the Nice in the late 1960s and Emerson Lake & Palmer from 1970. For his own snarling jazz-rock oeuvre, Emerson's favoured keyboard was the Hammond L-100. He loved it so much that onstage he liked to plunge a hunting knife between its keys to produce sustained and extreme tonal distortion and then climb on top and engage in vigorous frottage. His technicians had to conduct major surgery on the L-100 after every gig. Emerson was the love child of Jimi Hendrix and Richard Wagner. He was a genius, too.

Emerson's L-100 is currently on loan to The Met in New York, authentically preserved in its battered but unbowed glory. Meanwhile, Elephant9's keyboard player, Ståle Storløkken, is intent on keeping the beast's siblings out of museums. And he succeeds wonderfully. The L-100 is his number one keyboard on Mythical River, though he also plays Mellotron (with which Emerson had a short affair), grand piano, Fender Rhodes, Arp Pro Soloist and Moog Minimoog.

Formed in 2006 and with half-a-dozen studio albums and two live-doubles under their belt, in 2021 Elephant9 cut loose from their signature heavy-weaponry trajectory to inject more structure and less sonic excess into their groove: Arrival Of The New Elders (Rune Grammafon) set the scene for Mythical River. The band's post-2020 maturity has done nothing to diminish its Emmersonian echoes. On the contrary, Storløkken now has the space to add nuance and even the use of silence to the wildchild palette, and we the listeners have more space in which to appreciate it. The album moves delightfully between psychedelia, grinding jazz-rock and cosmic instrumental balladry. Simultaneously a trip down memory lane and a voyage of discovery.

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