Wibutee

Eight Domestic Challenges, as the title suggests, is an almost entirely home-made album. The essential musical raw material was captured and created during Wibutee's celebrated tours in France and Germany 2000/2001, with their improvised Live sets then recorded at Bugge Wesseltoft's legendary Oslo based studio, also known as "Bugge's Room"

However, the main production & post-production process involved many months of caffeine-induced intensive "home-work", where original band members constructed, de-constructed and focused to define the actual compositions and final sound of their new freestyle jazz improvisations. As the band themselves sayS�"One of the pitfalls of decomposing and producing your own recorded music is throwing away too much of the spontaneity, because when you1ve listened through each tune a thousand times you can easily end up bored with your own playing and ideas. We tried to keep as much of the actual forms and melodies intact, concentrating on beats, the programming and samples."

Indeed, Eight Domestic Challenges is a very beat orientated affair. Of the total eight tracks, only three began life with a defined melodic motif. "Our starting points were the loops and grooves that we liked to play live with. In the studio, Håkon´s (The Saxophonist) intentions were to improvise melodies rather than to just jam along with the grooves in a traditional jazz-related way. He also added saxophone sound-bytes that could be integrated within the Wibutee soundscape, instead of standard "saxophone-up-front" formula jazz thinking".

Eight Domestic Challenges defines the musical journey from what Wibutee presented the world on their last album "Newborn Thing" to where they are today. "We wanted to present different shades of our live material, not producing either a house-inspired album or a dub album entirely, although both styles and more are certainly represented as genres we "bump into" on the new album. The music now reflects how our stylistic influences have evolved: when we started in the trip-hop era of the mid 90's, we were then much more influenced by jazz. These days, however we are listening to contemporary classical music, noise, free improvised music, as well as ambient and electronica. Also, instead of vocals and Fender rhodes, we1re now recording and touring with fellow Norwegian electronica artist - STERNKLANG. This new electronic influence definitely shines through in the new album, perhaps reflecting the future sound and direction of Wibutee".

The new album contains eight tracks, with a total of 45 minutes of timeless "future jazz" sonics. Wibutee's Saxophonist, Håkon Kornstad, also known as one of Norway1s best up and coming graphic designers, has somehow found time to design the sleeve whilst mixing the album. Finding some images from an article about possible incidents at home in a Norwegian Interiors magazine from the 70sS�then blending them into a post-minimalistic neo-80s feel. Sounds very much like a Wibutee way of doing things! Indeed, they are in a very lucky position, having a visual artist in their line-up. Plans are being made to implement these visuals in to their Live concept.

Stay tuned for the multi-dimensional world of Wibutee!

Albums out:

• "Eight Domestic Challenges" 014 740-2
• "Newborn Thing" 547 033-2