Bendik Giske - Cracks review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

The Guardian 0

(Smalltown Supersound)
The Norwegian musician mics the whole studio, influenced by everything from techno to queer theory, on his hypnotic second album

Bendik Giske is a saxophonist who doesn’t appear to like the saxophone very much. As a gay man growing up in Norway, and then attending a music conservatoire in Copenhagen, he hated the straight, male establishment that constituted the Scandinavian jazz scene; he hated the saxophone’s “thrusting”, phallic implications; he even hated playing melodies on his instrument. “By playing tunes you step into that understanding of what the saxophone is supposed to be, what it usually does,” he says. “I wanted to find my voice by abandoning the soloist role, which is a very illogical thing to do on the saxophone.”