Erik Dahl Ensemble make music in a dreamland between jazz, chamber music and space rock. Everyone’s Too Sad For Everything is the second album by the group. The music was written during the period of isolation the pandemic forced upon us. Numerous emotions were evoked by the lack of concerts and social life.

“I wanted to transform that specific feeling into music. The loneliness, a soaring melancholy, sadness that comes and goes. While starting to write the music I stumbled on the phrase Everyone’s Too Sad For Everything in a book. The words are paradoxical, at first it sounds so gloomy. But there is also something else, slightly absurd, almost humoristic. To be sharing your sadness with others is actually kind of hopeful.”

1. Lagim
2. The Woods Within
3. Join The Dots
4. The Fragile Ones
5. Nocturnal
6. Unfolding
7. Vulkan
8. Ceremony
9. Too Sad
10. Frostblommor till Emma Niskanpää

The album opens on the fibrous Lagim and the languishing The Woods Within, and then brings us the playful Join The Dots, and then comes the ornately sculpted The Fragile Ones and then we get the sterner, regimented fare of Nocturnal.

Along next is the veritably ethereal Unfolding and the atmospherically stoic ache found within Vulkan and they are in turn backed by the precise nature of Ceremony, the album rounding out on the gentle, low slung hipsway of Too Sad, coming to a close on the sinewy fabric that is Frostblommor till Emma Niskanpää.

The members of the group are accomplished performers on the Swedish jazz and folk music scene. They enrich the music with their multifaceted personal expressions. The group is based in Gothenburg and led by critically acclaimed composer Erik Dahl whose compositions balances melodic simplicity with experimental impulses.

Music transports us to an inner landscape. It hints at a secret world that consciousness cannot reach. This is a place with both light and darkness. To get there you must dare to travel alone into the unknown. Music is the vessel that moves us.

We are all too sad. We are the fragile ones. But we are also hardy like mountain birches. We perform a ceremony, a dance to the apocalypse. We can join the dots to form new patterns. The butterfly of the cover represents transformation and hope.

Anna Cochrane, violin/viola
Andreas Thurfjell, alto/baritone saxophone/clarinet
Anna Malmström, clarinet/bass clarinet
Erik Dahl, piano/electronics
Viktor Reuter, double bass
William Soovik, drums/percussion

Bandcamp Purchase Link

www.serik-dahl.se/ensemble

Erik Dahl Ensemble @ Facebook