EIVIND AARSET 4TET (nor)
The guitar wizard with a new album
When EIVIND AARSET releases a new album, we can be sure: something special is on the way. In March 2026, Aarset's new album Strange Hands will be released, showcasing his long-standing quartet in its brightest form. Aarset, Audun Erlien, Wetle Holte, and Erland Dahlen expand their shared vocabulary into something both leaner and more unpredictable. The music feels closer to the core: fewer obvious embellishments, more immediate impact – yet still immersed in the shifting play of light and shadow that has always made Aarset's sound so eerily cinematic.
From heavy metal guitarist to experimental sound tinkerer — like many guitarists of his generation, Eivind Aarset, born in 1961 in Drøbak, Norway, was influenced by rock musicians, particularly Jimi Hendrix. In the mid-1970s, he began to take an interest in electrified jazz, especially the Miles Davis album Agharta, where Pete Cosey, with his wild, distorted electric guitar, evoked memories of Hendrix. Around the same time, Aarset also discovered the early ECM albums of his Norwegian compatriots Terje Rypdal and Jan Garbarek. Nevertheless, Aarset initially established himself as a heavy rock guitarist before evolving into a session guitarist, participating in over 150 Norwegian and international productions. During these recording sessions, he eventually met Bugge Wesseltoft and Nils Petter Molvær. In 1997, Molvær and Aarset joined the band of percussionist Marilyn Mazur and recorded the album Small Labyrinths with her for ECM. However, they made headlines that same year with another release: Molvær's groundbreaking album Khmer. This was the first time Aarset's bold guitar could be heard extensively, weaving through adventurous samples, programmed beats, and turntable scratching. In Molvær's band, Aarset enjoyed the freedom to develop his structured guitar playing. With the five solo albums Électronique Noir, Light Extracts, Connected, Sonic Codex, and Live Extracts, released in the following years on Bugge Wesseltoft's Jazzland label, the guitarist not only caused a stir in the European press. The New York Times called Électronique Noire "one of the best electric jazz albums since Miles Davis." And the All Music Guide noted that Aarset set a new standard for fusion music.
Thus, Eivind Aarset is rightly regarded worldwide as one of the defining sound architects of modern jazz, redefining the international scene between jazz, ambient, and experimental music with electronically enhanced guitar textures. He breaks the boundaries of jazz guitar and transforms it into an instrument for soundscapes typically found only electronically. It is not the technology at his feet that makes Aarset's work so special, but the decisions at his fingertips: his clear tone, his phrasing, his instinct for where exactly a note should begin and end. Effects, textures, and sophisticated sound design remain indispensable, yet they serve a player whose identity would be unmistakable even with nothing more than a cable, a guitar, and an amplifier. Strange Hands underscores this fact with quiet self-assurance, adding another independent chapter to a work that becomes increasingly coherent, exploratory, and unmistakably its own.
Doors open at 7 PM // Please use public transportation as much as possible for your visit. Thank you!
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