There is something wonderfully perverse about "What Just Happened?" being released under the name Large Unit: Small Units. Paal Nilssen-Love has spent much of his career proving that an ensemble can behave like a weather system with a percussion section, and here he takes that considerable mass of musicianship and reduces it to four compact experiments: five drummers, six saxophones, three accordions and three tubas. The title sounds less like a statement than the expression of someone discovering, several hours too late, that his scientific experiment has escaped the laboratory.

That response is, in fact, precisely what Nilssen-Love was after. The title originated with his series of Large Unit projects in Oslo, where the intention was to leave performers and listeners uncertain about exactly what had happened to them. The same principle remains at the heart of this 49-minute record, recorded at Tøyen Kirke in June 2025 and released through his own PNL Records.

Nilssen-Love is perhaps best known as one of the great physical forces of contemporary improvised music, a drummer whose career has involved important collaborations with figures such as Peter Brötzmann, Frode Gjerstad and a long procession of musicians unwilling to behave themselves. With Large Unit, however, his role has expanded considerably. Since the ensemble's beginnings, he has used it as a laboratory for collective playing, bringing together younger Norwegian musicians with more established figures while gradually giving composition a more prominent role. PNL Records, founded by Nilssen-Love in 2007, has become an extension of that activity, documenting his own work as well as the many branches growing from the Large Unit family tree.

"What Just Happened?" makes an intriguing proposition: what happens when an ensemble associated with abundance is organised around instrumental monoculture? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

“5 X 10”, written for five drummers, begins by treating percussion almost as a field of controlled disturbance. The five players do not simply pile up rhythms until the poor listener starts checking the smoke detector. Nilssen-Love gives them patterns, repetitions and gradual shifts, making the snare drum itself the protagonist. The effect can initially seem austere, even ceremonial, before small alterations begin to destabilise the apparent order. Five drummers playing essentially the same instrument might sound like an invitation to rhythmic anarchy, but Nilssen-Love is interested in the opposite possibility: how much difference can be extracted from sameness?

This is also where the album establishes one of its central ideas. Limitation becomes an instrument in itself. When every musician has access to the same sonic family, individuality has to emerge through timing, pressure, articulation and restraint. The performers become less like five separate drummers than five different ways of making a snare drum misbehave.

“Spread Rain” moves into more volatile territory. Six saxophones, joined here by Andreas Røysum on bass clarinet, produce a remarkably flexible collective voice, capable of moving from thin air and delicate mechanical noises towards much denser eruptions. The arrangement allows the reeds to behave almost like a single organism at certain moments, before individual voices suddenly protrude from the mass.

This is probably the most immediately convincing piece on the album because Nilssen-Love understands that six saxophones do not need to sound like a larger saxophone section. The interest lies in friction: breath against pitch, multiphonics against recognisable tone, coordinated movement against individual resistance. The piece can be fragile one moment and positively unruly the next. It also demonstrates why this project cannot simply be filed under “free jazz” and left there with a small administrative stamp. There is too much attention to proportion and orchestration. Improvisation is present, but so is the composer standing behind the curtain, moving the furniture around.

Then comes “Dragespel”, perhaps the album's strangest and most rewarding proposition. Three accordions are capable of sounding sentimental, folkloric, comic, funereal or downright threatening, sometimes within the same breath. Nilssen-Love exploits all of those associations without allowing the instrument to settle comfortably into any of them. The piece starts from a sustained, almost organ-like sonority before fragmenting into sharper gestures, sudden movements and strange mechanical eruptions.

The accordion is particularly well suited to this kind of treatment because its expressive mechanism is already slightly theatrical: bellows inhale and exhale, reeds chatter, buttons and keys trigger tiny changes in pressure. Put three of them together and the instrument's traditional musical identity begins to fray. What remains is a wonderfully awkward machine for producing sound. Kalle Moberg, Maren Sofie Nyland Johansen and Mykola Sheremeta seem perfectly happy to investigate the machine room rather than perform the usual postcard version of accordion music. Humanity has spent centuries inventing instruments and then immediately deciding what they are supposed to sound like. Nilssen-Love's answer is essentially: let's not.

“Zlang!” closes the album with three tubas and an impressive refusal to behave like a dignified brass ensemble. Per Ake Holmlander, Børre Mølstad and Sondre Ross Folkestad explore the tuba's enormous lower register as though it were a piece of industrial equipment whose warranty expired sometime in 1978.

There is humour here, but it is not novelty humour. The tuba is funny partly because of its physical presence, yet the composition uses that ridiculousness intelligently. Low brass can sound monumental, absurd, threatening and cartoonish almost simultaneously. Nilssen-Love keeps those possibilities in circulation, allowing fanfare-like gestures to collide with subterranean groans and deliberately ungainly exchanges. It is difficult to imagine another instrument producing quite the same combination of majesty and mild panic. The album's most interesting achievement is therefore conceptual rather than spectacular. Nilssen-Love has taken four instrumental groups that might ordinarily be considered rather limited and discovered that limitation can become a source of compositional abundance. Five snares, six reeds, three accordions, three tubas: the numbers are small, but the possibilities are not.

This also explains why "What Just Happened?" occupies an unusual position within the Large Unit catalogue. Earlier projects have demonstrated Nilssen-Love's appetite for large-scale collective improvisation and increasingly ambitious compositional structures. The Small Units project turns that process inside out. Instead of asking how much sound a large ensemble can generate, it asks how much musical information can survive when the available materials are severely restricted. The answer is enough to fill almost fifty minutes without resorting to the usual free-jazz arms race, where everyone eventually plays louder because somebody apparently misplaced the emergency exit.

The recording at Tøyen Kirke is crucial to the experience. Christian Brynildsen Obermayer handled recording, mixing and mastering, while Nilssen-Love produced the album himself; the church setting gives the instruments enough acoustic presence to reveal their physical qualities without turning everything into reverberant soup.

There is, admittedly, a certain dryness to parts of the record. One recent review found the opening percussion piece comparatively static and regarded the album as the least dynamically varied of Nilssen-Love's three closely related releases. That criticism is not entirely unreasonable. “5 X 10” demands patience, and "What Just Happened?" is not constructed around the instant gratification of escalating intensity. Its pleasures are cumulative, embedded in microscopic changes and in the performers' command of their instruments.

But that apparent austerity is also part of the point. Nilssen-Love is not trying to make a miniature Large Unit. He is dismantling the expectation that more musicians automatically means more possibilities. Sometimes the opposite is true. Remove the safety net of variety and every sound acquires a sharper responsibility.

The record's title consequently becomes more amusing with each listen. At first it sounds like bewilderment. Eventually it feels more like a methodological question. What just happened? A rhythm? A composition? An improvisation? A joke involving three tubas? A serious investigation into instrumental behaviour disguised as an extremely strange afternoon at church? Probably all of them. And perhaps that is the most Paal Nilssen-Love thing about "What Just Happened?": the music never chooses between discipline and mischief. It keeps both alive, letting formal ideas collide with the wonderfully unreasonable fact that humans have built machines out of metal, wood, leather and buttons, then spent centuries finding increasingly inventive ways to make them scream.