Nils Petter Molvær – Khmer

This 16-bit 1997 release (Qobuz) sounds amazing. The clarity, dynamics, and mix are perfect. This sounds like a High Dynamic Range album, I don't think there's any compression at all. There's some strong bass lines but they're well defined and not bloated. Excellent!

An amazing album, his best I feel. I have it on CD but getting vinyl is on my wish list.

I agree with wesyhysy: fantastic pressing - I bought the CD when it first came out and I just had to have it on vinyl.
Wonderful music and a flawless pressing. Side B has many quiet ages and they are absolutely dead silent.
Highly recommended for me.

It seemed to me or not, I will not say exactly, but this music is little like modern jazz, like Andrzej Jagodzianski Trio. Rather, it 's avant-garde jazz from the future.

Fantastic pressing of this classic Nils Petter Molvær album. Clear sound as usually from ECM.

As I vinyl junkie I have to it: this recording is superb on this cd. Amazing stereo sound. The bass is deeper than deep. Clear at the same. A true ddd recording.

This was a pioneering venture for ECM and I being a fan of ECMs more electric and eclectric jazz was thrown a punch in the ear when I heard it over a decade ago.
You take one part Miles Davis late 70s era sound, one part down-tempo, one part fringe electronica and what you get is some darn amazing innovative music by one Norwegian who decided to take door number three within the context of what jazz is defined.
The turn tables, looped and wah/talkbox guitar, muted trumpet and heavy electric bass just grooves so hot you'd think global warming took its cue from this recording.
Some really exciting music that even today in 2017 sounds fresh and groundbreaking. Nils solos are poignant and precise without overbearing all the other instrumentation and thats what makes this a winner in my music library.
As a side note the deluxe version has a bonus cd of extra mixes. His follow-up Solid Ether is equally strong but Khmer is hard to topple as far as freshness!

Review by Christian Genzel
Khmer is surely the most unusual album ever released by ECM -- unusual because the label, which is best known for elevated chamber jazz, presents the solo debut of trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer as a production that plays with modern electronica methods while not eschewing the well-known ECM aesthetic. Molvaer's music is somewhere between scary and majestic, and changes between ominous ambient sounds and hard breakbeats, along which atonal screeching guitars combined with melancholic melodies, create a fascinating mélange. Above all this thrones Molvaer's trumpet: lyrical, hectic, calm and sad, trembling and screaming. Molvaer is one of the most progressive and intelligent voices in jazz today, and with Khmer he's recorded one of the best jazz albums of the '90s