Speilstillevariasjoner. A title that flickers like water, bending light into sound, distorting reflections into something almost - but not quite - familiar. With his seventh solo album on Hubro, Stein Urheim continues his lifelong excavation of tuning systems, stringed alchemy, and microtonal worlds, leading his listeners into a hall of mirrors where the very notion of “in tune” is called into question.

Urheim has never been one for the straight path. From his early blues-inflected explorations to the shimmering microtonal landscapes of "Utopian Tales" and "Simple Pieces and Paper Cut-Outs", his work has always seemed to exist in parallel dimensions - one foot in ancient traditions, the other stepping lightly into the unknown. On "Speilstillevariasjoner", he pushes even further into the deep end, abandoning conventional guitar logic in favor of a fretless, specially tuned instrument that forces his hands - and his compositions - into strange, beautiful contortions.

The album brings together a dream team of collaborators, each a shape-shifter in their own right: Ikue Mori, the avant-garde sorceress of electronics; saxophonist Sam Gendel, whose liquid phrasing drifts between jazz and vaporous dream states; violinist Hans Kjorstad, a master of folk-inflected abstraction; and percussionist Siv Øyunn Kjenstad, whose rhythms move like shifting tectonic plates, quiet and cataclysmic all at once. Together, they don’t just play music - they "coax" it into existence, like radio operators picking up signals from another reality.

Take "Speilstemt", the opener, where guitars ring out like ghostly zithers, their overtones locking into place with a precision that feels almost accidental. Or "Morgendugg på svart panser", where Kjenstad’s drumming mimics the tap-tap-tap of raindrops on metal, while Gendel’s saxophone slithers through the mix like a sentient vapor. Then there’s "Ferskvannsdelfinens blues", an eight-minute journey that sounds like a blues song beamed in from an alternate Earth where dolphins have discovered free jazz.

Urheim has cited influences as varied as the Chinese gu qin, Norwegian langeleik, and just intonation pioneers like Lou Harrison and La Monte Young. But "Speilstillevariasjoner" isn’t an academic exercise - it’s deeply physical, visceral even. The altered tunings don’t just color the harmonies; they "warp" time itself, making familiar progressions feel like shifting sand underfoot.

This is an album for deep listeners, for those who enjoy getting lost in the topography of sound. It’s for anyone who has ever watched a reflection ripple across water and thought, just for a moment, that they were seeing a world beyond their own.