The basic conception of this album is good, and perhaps better understood by those who have visited Denmark and experienced Højskolesangbogen, the singalong songs that date back to 19th century Denmark that can break out in a Danish bar at a certain time of night, or at family and social gatherings and is very much part of the Danish tradition and culture.

Anderskov takes 10 of these songs and moves them through the prism of contemporary interpretation. The idea is good, the execution questionable. The exposition of the source material – the strong melodic character of folkloric material – is fragmented in da-da-esque gestures, before moving into episodes of free interpretation. Thus, we get a sense of having arrived at our destination without having left the station. By obscuring the music’s origins – it could well be abstracted fragments from Alban Berg’s Lulu — we get neither the essence of the music’s purpose and quickly get lost in a kind of no man’s land of free expression “on the precipice of the avant garde,” as the accompanying notes claim.

By obscuring the music’s purpose, its meaning becomes obscure by avoiding the nitty gritty of developing and shaping the source material through developmental techniques such as variation, inversion, augmentation, and ultimately fragmentation or even like Lulu, using Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique, before arriving at an abstracted coda.