Fuglen flyr godt (TAPE)

Description

Fuglen flyr godt (“The bird flies well”) is the second solo album by Norwegian multidisciplinary artist Espen Friberg, following 2022’s Sun soon (Hubro). Recorded in the coastal town of Hvitsten, Norway, through the winter and spring of 2025–26, the album consists of eleven pieces made entirely on the Serge Modular synthesizer. Through improvisation and experimentation, Friberg treats the Serge as a shifting network of relationships, developing a vocabulary of idiosyncratic melodies and textures by turns warm, fluid, woody, and curiously animate. This is music developed in close proximity to Friberg’s surroundings in Hvitsten—pine forests, smooth seaside rocks, and changing winter light. Rather than translating these things into anything explicitly programmatic, Fuglen flyr godt absorbs their scale and ephemerality. Friberg follows his instrument into unexpected places: patterns cohere and slip apart, rough textures give way to passages of peculiar delicacy, and the open-ended architecture of the Serge yields a broad range of gestures and environments. Mixed and produced by Friberg’s longtime collaborator Jenny Berger Myhre (Flutter Ridder) and mastered by Eivind Opsvik, Fuglen flyr godt finds Friberg bringing his characteristic lightness of touch to the Serge ecosystem, coaxing organic, playful music from its unruly circuitry—music that feels of a piece with the landscape around him.