It pulls you into its slow-motion world, where notes hang like bubbles rising from deep water.
Hobby horse Records
Rasmus Kjær – piano; Nicolas Masson – tenor & soprano saxophone, clarinet; Noé Franklé – drums
Copenhagen pianist and composer Rasmus Kjær Larsen has always chased new sounds—through synth projects, organ works, and boundary-pushing collaborations. With Underlake, he returns to the acoustic piano for a deeply personal and sonically immersive trio exploration of water’s impact on human life.
Joined by Swiss drummer Noé Franklé and ECM saxophonist Nicolas Masson, Kjær draws on his year by Lake Geneva to shape music that feels submerged, reflective, and in constant motion.
The opening track, “Almost Weightless,” grew out of an exercise from one of Kjær’s former teachers: imagine floating in a lake, listening for tones rising like bubbles. Kjær took the idea literally, composing while suspended in Lake Geneva. The piece begins with brushes rasping across the drum head, like something dragged through sand, before the saxophone enters with slow, carefully placed notes edged in vibrato, and the piano answers with brief lines that climb and fall along the keyboard.
That sense of suspension carries into the next piece. The piano lets rumbling notes resonate like waves pulling back from the shore on “Slow Swell,” while the saxophone traces fluid lines that start, drift away, and return again. The drums add to the ebb and flow—occasional hits like objects knocking against a pier—until the music feels caught in a gentle, restless tide.
If “Slow Swell” leans toward meditative drift, “Adrift” pushes into more turbulent waters. It opens with a plaintive sax call over tinkling piano and rolling drums, before Masson’s cries grow sharper and the piano grows louder and more melodic, while still skirting dissonance. The storm clears somewhat with “Ondine in Silhouette,” where the mood turns darker but also more stately. There’s a lyrical sax line shadowed by piano runs that feel slightly twisted, as if something is lurking beneath the surface. Yet there’s also a lift in the playing, as though the weight is beginning to ease.
Much of the record is built on a seven-tone mode of Kjær’s own invention, giving the music an unsettled beauty, like calm waters hiding a shifting undercurrent.
Underlake isn’t background music. It pulls you into its slow-motion world, where notes hang like bubbles rising from deep water.
