Cracks

Norwegian saxophonist Bendik Giske makes records like almost nobody else: alone in a room, circular breathing keeping his tenor saxophone alive in one unbroken line whilst the space around him becomes the second instrument. Cracks, his second album for Smalltown Supersound—already named Contemporary Album of the Month by the Guardian—finds him handing those raw performances to Norwegian producer André Bratten, who treats them not as finished takes but as source material for the studio itself.

Where Giske’s 2019 debut Surrender presented his playing almost untouched, Bratten’s contribution here is more active, and more radical: the electronics never answer the saxophone so much as inhabit the same room as it. Reverb is used to paint the walls, delays to extend the breath, and the occasional pitch-shifted shadow reminds you the machine is listening. Opening track Flutter demonstrates the approach at its most beguiling—a single tremulous sustained tone oscillates against a bed of warm, granular texture, and the two sources become inseparable long before the four minutes are up.

Cruising is the album’s centrepiece, and its finest demonstration of Giske’s technique. The horn sounds as though it has been recorded in a cathedral the size of a warehouse, each harmonic drifting slowly through Bratten’s delay lines as the piece gathers momentum imperceptibly across its ten and a half minutes. Nothing is hurried; the patience is total, and the payoff is a slow, ecstatic swell that feels like the sun clearing a ridge.

Void is the most fragile thing here—a bare, breathy outline that barely registers above a whisper—before the title track Cracks lets the overblown, split tones in: the moments where the saxophone’s sound folds in on itself, caught mid-break by Bratten’s processors and suspended in a thick cloud of reverb across its eight and a half minutes. Closer Matter (part 3) feels like a coda of settled dust, the electronics now fully ascendant, trailing off into a haze that never quite resolves.

Cracks is a record of remarkable restraint and confidence, one that rewards the patience it demands. The production is immaculate without ever showing off: every delay tail and reverb wash serves the tone it surrounds, and Giske’s playing—by turns tender and ferocious—remains unmistakably human at the centre of it all. It’s neither background music nor a technical stunt; it’s a dialogue between breath and machine that gets more compelling the closer you listen.