Recently, while Rune Grammofon have continued to weave their merry patterns with a typically diverse line-up, I’ve been content to sit on the sidelines, gazing on with the insouciance of an unused French substitute. I may even have shrugged in stereotypical gallic fashion. However, I’ve been waiting too long, and can’t contain myself any longer: they have released Raoul Bjorkenheim onto the field, and he is bristling with so much menace and energy that I’ve been forced to shed my tracksuit top to keep tabs on him.

The excellent new Scorch Trio album Brolt! occasionally gives up glimpses of the band’s lineage: there are bloodlines connecting this to Live Evil era Miles, or Band of Gypsies funk. Opening track “Olstra” smashes the place up with some frenetic squall, before closing with some one-note bass and spacey wah-wah; this gives way to the whistling feedback of “Basjen” (the album’s “Little Church”, perhaps). “Hys” is endearingly entangled in the knotty drumming of the perpetual motion machine Paal Nilsen-Love, as is “Gaba”, although that breaks free to build to a climax of almost unrecognisably-distorted and echoing guitar from Bjorkenheim. The full Sonny Sharrock, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a trumpet, or a saxophone. Closer “Bluring” is a smear of noise, with hyperactive bass from Nilsen-Love’s colleague in The Thing, Ingebrigt Haker Flaten. Scorch Trio are truly an exclamation mark in three-human form.

Bjorkenheim features as part of this new Box ensemble also, along with members of Supersilent, Fantomas and Zappa’s Universe. Originally intended merely as a live soundtrack to a film, the results were thought too good not to result in a proper release. I heartily concur. Studio One is somewhere between those aforementioned three groups, with an unmistakeable nod to Dark Magus-era Miles (who else?). The behemoth “Untitled 9” which stands at the gate to the album is as inspired piece of improvised free-prog-rock-tech-jazz lunacy. Driven on by an irrestible rhythm provided by Morgan Agren on drums and Trevor Dunn on bass, Bjorkenheim’s shrieking guitar duels with Stale Storlokken’s squealing keyboards. This is punctuated by a fidgety, tension-building bass arco bass and drums face-off before it all explodes again at the end. Elsewhere, the sort of unfathomably tangled rhythm thing that Supersilent excel at turns up at the start of “Untitled 7” and “Untitled 13”, as well as the end of “Untitled 3” (the eagle-eyed readers who point out the typos that litter this site will no doubt be spotting a pattern to these track names).

With the help of Raoul Bjorkenheim, Rune Grammofon are back on championship-winning form; buying these records would surely dispel any lingering ennui.