Pixel
The award-winning Norwegian jazz quartet Pixel is in the vanguard of a scene brimming with exceptional young musicians, charting an exhilarating, improvisation-steeped jazz path infused with the cathartic energy of indie rock. Pixel’s third album Golden Years captures the next step in the band’s rapid evolution.

Led by the dynamic double bassist, vocalist, and songwriter Ellen Andrea Wang, Pixel features drummer Jon Audun Baar, trumpeter Jonas Kilmork Vemøy, and saxophonist Harald Lassen (with everyone contributing vocals). While the band’s instrumentation brings to mind Ornette Coleman’s seminal free jazz quartet of the late 1950s, Pixel tends more toward translucent textures, tight orchestration and pop-inflected songcraft than harmelodic hurly burly. While the sound is essentially acoustic, Vemøy and Lassen increasingly employ subtle effects that provide deeper textural depth to the already charged mélange of bright harmonies and protean rhythmic thrust.

Golden Years is the result of Pixel’s bustling 2014, a year in which the quartet played nearly 100 gigs (while also each pursuing projects of their own). When they started the recording process at the end of the year, everyone brought new songs to the table, tunes documented over five intensive days in the studio. Together these extraordinary musicians created an expansive album and sound unlike any other band on the scene. Still growing and discovering what they’re capable of, the musicians of Pixel are in their prime, and the group’s compelling third album makes a case that these are the best of times on the Oslo scene.