There is something faintly suspicious about an album called "Lokalt Piano" by a musician who has spent roughly a quarter of a century travelling around the world making music. After years of Kongsberg, Japan and countless intermediate destinations, Morten Qvenild has apparently discovered the radical proposition that home is also somewhere. This time, the somewhere is Nesodden, where he recorded the album in Ugla Lyd, the green studio in his garden. The title sounds modest. The music is considerably less so.

Qvenild has been one of the more difficult Norwegian musicians to put in a single box. His work has crossed jazz, improvisation, electronics and pop, from In the Country and Susanna and the Magical Orchestra to collaborations with Susanne Sundfør, Arve Henriksen, Nils Petter Molvær and, rather unexpectedly for anyone who insists on keeping musical genres in separate drawers, A-ha. His 2015 "Personal Piano" explored what happens when the acoustic piano is technologically altered and treated almost as a compositional instrument in its own right. "Lokalt Piano" continues that fascination, but turns its attention from what the piano can become to what it means to make music from one particular patch of the world.

The result is an album of eight songs that sounds intimate without becoming cosy. Piano, electronics, programming and Qvenild's deliberately processed voice coexist in arrangements that are often spare but rarely plain. The opening "The Flame" establishes the contradiction immediately: personal responsibility, domestic life and environmental anxiety are placed alongside the image of fire, with the warmth of home increasingly difficult to separate from the consequences of what surrounds it. The song does not need to turn into an ecological sermon. Its unease is already embedded in the music.

That unease becomes more complicated on "Være Lære". The Norwegian title plays on the relationship between “being” and “learning”, and the song circles around the difficulty of remaining present when remaining can itself become a burden. Qvenild's voice is not conventionally polished, and that works in its favour. It sounds like somebody thinking aloud rather than somebody delivering a perfectly rehearsed emotional statement. The electronics give the piano a slightly unstable halo, keeping the supposedly familiar instrument from becoming reassuring furniture.

Then comes "Out of Blue Comes Green", Qvenild's highly personal reworking of the song by Paul Waaktaar-Savoy. Given his history with A-ha, the choice is more than a curious cover. The original belongs to a very different musical universe, yet Qvenild slows its emotional machinery down until its melody seems to have been left outside in the Norwegian climate for several years. His relationship with A-ha is hardly incidental: he joined the group's live band for the 2017 MTV Unplugged concerts and later tours, making this one of those rare covers in which biography actually changes what you hear.

"Stay Alive" moves further into ambiguity. Love, responsibility, fear and the urge to withdraw keep colliding, while the song's understated arrangement refuses to provide the kind of cathartic release pop music normally owes us. Qvenild seems more interested in the uncomfortable middle ground where conflicting impulses simply continue to coexist. It is a recurring quality throughout the album: things are rarely resolved because real life has the irritating habit of continuing after the chorus.

The most obvious emotional centre arrives with "Boys of Summer", where Solveig Slettahjell takes the vocal. The Don Henley cover could easily have become an exercise in tasteful Scandinavian melancholy, a genre with enough practitioners to require its own municipal authority. Instead, Qvenild strips away much of the original's polished nostalgia and lets Slettahjell bring a worn, reflective quality to the song. In this setting, its themes of ageing, absence and the inability to return to an earlier version of oneself acquire a strangely local gravity.

"Ghettoblaster" disrupts the introspection with something much more primitive and insistent. Its repeated central image turns the portable speaker into a kind of unwanted local monument, simultaneously banal and threatening. Qvenild understands that the environment is not merely trees, rain and picturesque oak forests. It also contains noise, technology, neighbours, human intrusion and the various ways we insist on announcing our existence to everyone within earshot.

That tension is central to the album's idea of locality. "Lokalt Piano" was developed alongside the Nesodden art collective Lang Omvei, with visual artist Jon Benjamin Tallerås photographing nearby natural areas and writer Lars Mørch Finborud contributing a text about Nesodden. The project has also been presented through small concerts in churches, forests, museums, mines and other local sites before arriving at the Nesodden Jazz Festival. The music therefore belongs to a broader artistic experiment about attachment to place, rather than simply providing an attractive soundtrack to somebody's garden.

"Relativisme" and "After the Rain" bring that argument towards its quieter conclusions. Things disappear, people change, everything remains provisional. Rain becomes less a picturesque Norwegian accessory than an event capable of changing how the world looks afterwards. Qvenild's music has enough electronic intervention to prevent these songs from becoming straightforward singer-songwriter fare, yet enough melodic instinct to keep the experimentation human-sized.

What makes "Lokalt Piano" particularly interesting is its refusal to romanticise staying put. The album is about locality, but it is also about the complications of belonging to somewhere. A place can nourish you, constrain you, irritate you and become part of your identity without ever becoming entirely yours. Nature can be cherished while simultaneously being altered by the people doing the cherishing. Even the idea of “home” turns out to be less stable than the word suggests.

For a musician whose career has involved so much movement, Qvenild's decision to look nearby is therefore not a retreat. It is another experiment. The piano remains recognisably his, but the scale has changed: fewer airports, more trees; less elsewhere, more here. And perhaps the most convincing thing about "Lokalt Piano" is that “here” proves to be anything but simple.

Sometimes you have to travel for twenty-five years to discover that the interesting material was sitting in the garden all along.