Mark Solborg & Herb Robertson: NOD

Solborg: “ I really like the way you slowly bend an idea into something new. ..all of a sudden it’s something else and you never noticed when it started changing..”

Robertson: “oh - you mean mutation.....”

In 2008 the guitarist Mark Solborg invited the American trumpeter Herb Robertson to Denmark to join his quartet. During those days they also recorded the duo-album “NOD”.

Melodic, fabulating and epic landscapes unfold in a beautiful, intimate and - now and again - minimalistic universe with ample room for detail and Robertsons unique sound. The music is born in an intuitive space that might have more to do with an approach to life than a specific musical genre.

NOD is mutual understanding and respect, NOD is a device for nocturnal observation, NOD is the wasteland to which Cain was banished, NOD is the Land of Dreams and mutating imagination..

During the working process with NOD we stumbled upon these verses that struck resonance with both of us.

The Land of Nod

From breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.

All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do -
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.

The strangest things are there for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the land of Nod.

Try as I like to find the way,
I never can get back by day,
Nor can remember plain and clear
The curious music that I hear.

Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–1894). A Child’s Garden of Verses and Underwoods. 1913.

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