Babies On Airplanes: Music For A Noisy Environment

Babies On Airplanes is Anna Ueland's trio project. The cover's suggestion of a run-of-the-mill piano/synthesiser-bass-drums trio formula is deceptive. The album deploys a bric-à-brac in the service of a jazz that navigates between synth-pop, pure improvisation (whatever that means), rock, and pretty much anything else one might want to put in it. Ueland, a physicist who turned to music early, is a unique voice on the young Norwegian jazz scene, impressing through her vigorously melodic instinct (melody: first keyword), without any musical style being spared. In other circumstances, Ueland would contribute to a furious swing rooted as far back as Count Basie, as in Pauline Boty: bring her out! (Particular Recordings Collective, 2026) by Jenny Frøysa's Artful Ensemble, released two months earlier; or to string music that defies words: Popular Music For Like-Minded People, for which an avatar is expected later in 2026.

Music For A Noisy Environment balances six free improvisations and six compositions. Ueland's piano is rather in its flea-market incarnation, and readily gives way to the Wurlitzer. Through "Three Days in a Flow," "Monkey Brain," and "Kong Kokong" (where everyone takes to the piano) there floats the pleasant nostalgia of Jenny Frøysa's Artful Ensemble the pianist. The drums of Gustav Tornberg are complemented by an array of light percussion that lifts the music, which Johannes Elnan (bass) nevertheless anchors firmly in jazz tonality.

Reverie ("Cassiopeja," "Riddles and Raccoons") is a second keyword. Ideas passing through the mind, atmospheres that emerge and follow one another in the noisy environment of intercontinental flights that Babies on Airplanes explore in a somewhat phantasmatic way ("Small Fish in a Big Pond"), while sparing us their carbon footprint. Ueland wanders a little through all corners with her out-of-tune piano, and the trio depicts these moments where everything and nothing happens: the clouds, perhaps a stretch of Greenland ("Transatlantic Scene"), a contrail, the irregular noise of a trolley. When the cabin lights go out, when one is not tired, or too tired; when even numbing oneself in front of a mindless film no longer appeals, what remains are the senses alert, thought more or less under control, a vaporous imagination catching the tiny things (or animals?) unfolding to the left and to the right. All this is in the album.

A third keyword is cinematic. There is no need to bore yourself stiff on a plane. Everyone can make the album their own and script their day, preferably one of waiting or idleness.

"Det var kjempebra (It was brilliant)!—Å ja! (Oh yes!)." (You can hear it at the end of the first track already, "Guro's tape.") A superb discovery indeed!