There are bands that play loud, bands that play fast, and bands that apparently regard the distinction between composition and controlled demolition as an unnecessary bureaucratic obstacle. (Exit) Knarr belongs to the third category. On "fly", recorded at Oslo's Victoria Nasjonal Jazzscene at the end of the European tour that followed "Drops", Ingebrigt Håker Flaten's sextet takes material associated with both "Drops" and "Breezy" and subjects it to the peculiar logic of a band that has spent enough time together to stop behaving like a band and start behaving like a single, mildly unstable creature.

This matters because "fly" is not simply the obligatory live album with a little extra perspiration left on the microphones. The pieces have changed. Fragments from earlier compositions have been absorbed into new structures, familiar ideas have acquired different proportions, and the musicians seem increasingly interested in what happens after a composition has stopped being something to reproduce. The result is a record that occupies an awkward and fertile territory between repertoire and improvisation.

Flaten is hardly a newcomer to awkward territories. The Norwegian bassist has spent decades moving between free jazz, improvised music and more formally organised projects, with credits that include The Thing, Atomic, School Days, Free Fall and collaborations with figures such as Joe McPhee, Evan Parker and Håkon Kornstad. His reputation as an extraordinarily active sideman might actually obscure one of his more interesting qualities: he is a composer who understands that a score doesn't necessarily have to tell musicians what to do. Sometimes it has to give them something sufficiently sturdy to attack.

(Exit) Knarr, originally assembled for Vossa Jazz in 2021, has become the ideal vehicle for that philosophy. Previous records already established a peculiar equilibrium between written material, collective freedom, rock propulsion, electronics and the abrasive possibilities of free improvisation. "Breezy" demonstrated how sharply the group could move between melody and eruption, while "Drops" pushed further into graphic-score territory and gave electronics a more prominent role without allowing them to sterilise the human component of the music.

"fly" sounds like the next logical consequence: stop treating those compositions as fixed objects and see what they become when repeatedly thrown into the air.

The opening title piece lasts nearly thirteen minutes, and it earns its duration by refusing the usual dramaturgy of “quiet bit, loud bit, enormous solo, everyone goes home”. The six musicians constantly redistribute the weight. Amalie Dahl's alto and baritone saxophones and Karl Hjalmar Nyberg's tenor occupy different parts of the horn spectrum, sometimes forming a muscular front line, sometimes behaving more like competing weather systems. Marta Warelis can make the piano sound sharply architectural before allowing it to dissolve into the ensemble. Jonathan F. Horne brings a guitar vocabulary that has never seemed particularly interested in respecting the traditional border between jazz and noise. Olaf Olsen supplies the crucial physical momentum, while Flaten's double bass is frequently less a foreground voice than the load-bearing structure on which everyone else can perform acts of vandalism.

That last distinction is important. Flaten's bass playing here is not constantly demanding attention, because he doesn't need it. He creates movement by controlling density, repetition and gravity. When the band accelerates, the acceleration feels collective rather than decorative. When it suddenly withdraws, the silence seems to have been negotiated rather than merely left behind.

Then "breezy" arrives, carrying the ghost of the earlier album but refusing to behave like a reprise. The title has an unavoidable personal resonance, since the original composition was connected to Flaten's late friend and collaborator Jaimie Branch, whose music and attitude clearly remain part of the emotional background of the project. Yet the tribute is not treated as a solemn monument. Earlier versions of "Breezy" already balanced exuberance and elegy, moving through blues-inflected passages, spiritual-jazz colours and more unruly free-jazz terrain.

On "fly", the piece feels less like remembrance carved into stone and more like memory being handled by living musicians. That difference is considerable. The music doesn't freeze Branch into a historical figure. It keeps moving, which is probably the more appropriate form of tribute for an artist whose work was so invested in motion, collision and refusal.

The thirteen-minute "austin birds" is perhaps the clearest indication that this isn't merely a concert souvenir. The title recalls Flaten's Austin environment, but the music doesn't settle into postcard territory. Instead, the ensemble builds a strange geography out of short gestures, horn exchanges, rhythmic disruptions and increasingly unstable interactions. There is melody here, but it behaves like something overheard through several walls.

The group's greatest strength is its ability to make abrupt changes feel earned. A horn figure can become a rhythmic device; a guitar attack can function almost like percussion; Warelis' piano can suddenly turn a dense passage transparent. Electronics are used not as futuristic wallpaper but as another means of damaging the edges of the acoustic instruments. This is particularly revealing given the direction "Drops" had already taken, where electronic processing and graphic notation expanded the band's possibilities without replacing its acoustic core.

And then there is "chaos pad", which has the sort of title that could either be an accurate description or something written on a sticky note five minutes before rehearsal. Here it is both.

The six musicians sound as though they have discovered that chaos is actually quite difficult to achieve properly. Randomness is easy. Genuine instability requires architecture. The piece continually approaches collapse without quite falling into it, maintaining enough rhythmic and compositional information for the listener to sense an underlying design even when the surface becomes gloriously unruly.

This is one of the reasons "fly" feels different from a generic free-jazz blowout. There is plenty of force, certainly, but force isn't the point. Flaten's compositions provide frameworks that can survive being stretched. The band can rip into them, loosen them, fragment them and apparently set fire to the furniture while still retaining a sense of where the walls are.

That balance has been recognised in reactions to both "Breezy" and "Drops": critics have repeatedly pointed to the group's capacity to combine free-jazz intensity with grooves, formal structures and moments of surprising lyricism. The electronics may roughen the picture, but they don't flatten the acoustic musicians into a homogeneous electronic mass.

The live setting makes this quality more obvious because there is nowhere for the music to hide. Studio production can create the illusion of coherence after the fact; a stage has considerably less patience. Here, the coherence is generated in real time.

There is also something almost old-fashioned about the physicality of it. You can hear musicians listening, reacting, leaving space, occupying it again and occasionally behaving as though somebody has removed the emergency brake. The sophistication comes not from restraint but from knowing exactly how much pressure the structure can take before it becomes something else.

That is perhaps the central idea of "fly": transformation without erasure. The compositions from "Breezy" and "Drops" remain somewhere inside these performances, but in much the same way that a tree remains inside a wooden table. The original material has been cut, rearranged and given another function. It is still recognisable if you know where to look, but it has acquired a different life.

Flaten's achievement as a bandleader is therefore not simply that he has assembled six exceptionally capable improvisers. Plenty of people have done that, sometimes with results resembling a meeting where everyone has been given a microphone. His achievement is giving these musicians enough structure to generate collective identity without suffocating their individual instincts.

Amalie Dahl can be fierce without merely becoming “the saxophone soloist”. Nyberg can introduce electronics without turning the group into an electronic project. Warelis can disrupt the harmonic field without abandoning it. Horne can scrape and slash at the music without making noise itself the destination. Olsen can propel the entire mechanism while knowing when not to. Flaten holds all of this together with a bassist's particular understanding of weight: what must remain solid, what can move, and what can be allowed to fall.

The title "fly" consequently feels less like an instruction than a description of what happens when the music has accumulated enough momentum to leave the ground.

It doesn't float. It doesn't glide. It takes off. And when it does, (Exit) Knarr demonstrates that sophisticated ensemble playing need not look sophisticated from a distance. Sometimes it looks like six people making an extraordinarily convincing argument for why the furniture should be moved out of the way.

"fly" is a live album, technically speaking. In practice, it is something more interesting: a snapshot of compositions in transit, caught between their previous identities and whatever they may become next. The music remembers where it came from, but it has no particular interest in going back.

That is probably why the record feels so alive. It isn't documenting a finished thing. It is documenting a band discovering, in public, that its own music is still capable of changing shape.