Don’t trust the phonetic double sense of this CD’s title as something that will “ruin your day” if you take it home. And no, there aren’t any Germanic runes on auditory range, taking you to the Pagan mythical past of the European countries the same way a few Swedish and Norwegian doom metal bands do. It just happens that the composer and leader of Rune Your Day is Rune Nergaard, the same of groups like Bushman’s Revenge, Astro Sonic, Scent of Soil and Marvel Machine. Yes, the musicians gathered here – Jørgen Mathisen, André Roligheten and Axel Skalstad besides Nergaard – are from the lands formerly ruled by gods like Odin and Thor, but the imaginary involved is very much profane and of the present, as we can testify by the songs “Living in the Pink Bubble of Hubba Bubba”, “Crazy ‘Bout Oatmeal” and “Go Ahead, Punk!”. Each piece included in this recording is a chronicle of our mundane contemporaneity, coming from a hyperrealistic vision of American jazz which could only denounce a Scandinavian perspective. Almost no-one in the United States is self-conscious enough to play jazz like this – you need to have a distance to perceive all the nuances, and in Norway they do have it. Rune Your Day are the Denis Petersons of North European jazz and that’s so, so good.
Jørgen Mathisen tenor and soprano saxophone, clarinet
André Roligheten tenor and baritone saxophone
Rune Nergaard double bass
Axel Skalstad drums
All compositions by Rune Nergaard
Recorded by Jørgen Mathisen at Skarpretterboligen, Oslo, June 25th and 26th, 2016 | Mixed and mastered by Daniel Mikael Wold
Produced by Rune Your Day | Executive production by Pedro Costa for Trem Azul | Design by Travassos