Be Here Whenever is a perfect circle of nine creations by Danielle de Gruttola (cello), Henry Kaiser (guitar), Benedicte Maurseth (hardanger fiddle) and Stein Urheim (guitar). It is music filled with the intense mindfulness that comes when one is confronted by nature at its most awe-inspiring, those places where one becomes acutely aware of how small they are within this world, never mind the cosmos beyond its thin atmosphere.
Such moments give shape to spirits of nature, and it is these that inform the music of 'Be Here Whenever'. Beginning with the scene-setting "Frespel", with its evocation of light reflecting from snow and ice, the album winds a serpentine route through its milestones, embracing musical influences and accents from Norwegian folk to Delta Blues to ambient Americana to plainsong, with hints of familiar tones that echo from Ry Cooder to David Torn to Captain Beefheart.
The sound of resinous wooden string music from the cello and hardanger fiddle by turns dominates, integrates, and dissipates within the various guitar sounds that often take the modern "ambient guitar" vocabulary and reshape it into an entirely new patois, or soar into proto-electronic sounds that chatter, chirp and sing like unfamiliar birds or howl like wolves. By turns, the music can feel like music of worship for a church of vast open expanses, a ballet of snowflakes, a gumbo stomp from a Louisiana Bayou displaced to polar regions beneath whorls of aurora, or the sound of spring thaw. It endlessly evolves and reshapes itself, sonic forms emerging and receding, with varying intensity and density. It is the music of transformational and transforming nature, organic, untameable, intimately present.
