After three acclaimed and highly original solo albums the Bergen-based composer and slide-guitar master Stein Urheim is backed by six cherry picked musicians on 'Utopian Tales': Kjetil Mster (Mster!), Mari Kvien Brunvoll (Building Instrument), Per Jrgensen (Jkleba), Ole Morten Vgan (Trondheim Jazz Orchestra), Jrgen Tren (Sir Dupermann) and Kre Opheim (Real Ones). Much of the music has its origins in a commission from Vossajazz for the Voss Jazz Festival 2016, with Stein Urheim (who in 2010 received the Voss Jazzfestival-Award) further adapting and extending the material through later re-recordings and additional solo pieces. The result is a continuously changing tapestry of styles and textures that forms a kind of evolving commentary on the concept of microtonality and its various social and intellectual connections. The range of styles provides echoes of influences and exemplars drawn from often wildly different types of music, from the eccentric 'primitive' guitar patterns one hears in John Fahey and his followers, to the ambient slide-scapes associated with Roger Eno or Pink Floyd, through to the electric fusion of Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis, everything somehow remains all of a piece, and can best be appreciated as a continuously developing suite. On the beautiful penultimate track, 'Ustopia - Part Two', the atmospheric muted-trumpet of legendary Nordic musician Per Jorgensen and the other-worldly voice of Mari Kvien Brunvoll (with whom Urheim has already made three critically acclaimed duo albums) add their own distinctive identities to Utopian Tales' strange yet beautiful sound-world, which ends as it began, in a meditative solo piece for Urheim's guitar.