The five seconds of silence that precede the start of every ECM album are always telling. The anticipation; the lack of urgency at the start, heightened senses craving some recognisable sound. Yet rising from this darkened state, on Nils Petter Molvaer's ECM debut 'Khmer' was not a piano, or ride cymbal, or the pluck of a double bass string, but the droning twang of a dulcimer and the anguished wails of guitar feedback, Molvaer's whispering trumpet cutting a small yet determined path, cross-hatching little melodic marks. Thus begins the journey of one of today's most progressive musicians; a musician that subverted, by the sheer force and beauty of his music, the traditions of Europe's most revered jazz label, to produce an album of bold organic-electronica, recasting the acoustic electro-clash of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew for a new generation and a new century.

As the 1990s are perhaps best remembered for both the burgeoning grunge guitar scene and the incredible explosion in dance and computer-driven music, for a jazz musician to be looking over his shoulder at the past, or to be caught up in the present was to miss the opportunities that Molvaer seized when he created his new form of music on 'Khmer' in 1997. With solid jazz credentials under his belt, Molvaer embraced a new way of working, and with the detachment from any particular scene, aside from the sparseness of his native Oslo's cold beauty, his music possesses a clarity and directness that only increases its impact. Where the lesser artists simply added a break-beat under their '70s funk riffs or swinging jazz grooves, Molvaer took his electronic textures to new depths, without losing any live interaction or improvisation, retaining an expressive quality and freshness at every point in every song.

With the melancholy African sounds of 'Khmer' (the word itself meaning a dialect of Cambodian language) setting the tone, things continue with a disturbing yet compelling theme, 'Access / Song Of Sand I' featuring one of the album's hardest rhythms, coupled with one of its most cathartic chord-melodies, played by the master of guitar textures and NPM's right-hand-man, Eivind Aarset. The latter's guitar throughout this album makes that direct connection between rock, blues, grunge, jazz and ambient sounds that one minute remind you of a tortured Jimi Hendrix or the blissed-out, horizon-less sounds of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. 'On Stream' is the perfect example of this, with an insistent but muted percussion track below, Aarset's guitar spills fluid chords over which Molvaer pours his own personal stream of notes, the results achingly beautiful, yet melancholy. 'Platonic Years' suggests a lighter mood, a sense of travelling, a free momentum again driven by Aarset's simple strummed chords, as Nils takes the listener across another icy, melodic tundra. 'Phum' finds Molvaer carving a haunting solo line above the lowly whines of Roger Ludvigson's acoustic guitar, his effects pedals creating an otherworldly vista of notes. This feeling of weightlessness is all Molvaer needs to leap headlong into the chasm of 'Song Of Sand II', with its dark, brutal sounds accompany the thick dub bass and beats. This crushing end to NPM's first foray into a new sound universe then closes with 'Exit', a strange echoing whale-song cry, with a gently-thumping heartbeat of percussion leading the listener off into the night.

For all its rough edges 'Khmer' was and is an unparalleled success, for both label and artist, and saw ECM go one stage further and for the first in its history release two singles from the album. The most pertinent of these was 'Khmer: The Remixes' and featured three mixes by The Herbaliser, Mental Overdrive and Rockers Hi-Fi, each extracting something new from the sound tools NPM provided in the original. In this one prescient move, the single became the precursor to his next-but-one album 'Recoloured', that was based on remixes of his next full studio work, 'Solid Ether'.

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