Born in 1961, he began his career in electronic jazz-fusion, and since then has charted his own course through the perilous seas of modern music. In the early 1980s, while other young composers still grappled with conflicting ideologies of their art as science or as Zen Buddhism, he focused his attention on the present and practical, leading an electric jazz quintet and composing its entire repertoire. As co-founder in 1990 of the Athelas Sinfonietta of Copenhagen, one of Denmark?s leading ensembles, he was well aware of the challenge to composers confronted by conflicting perspectives of the new. Even so, his vocation at this time was to train as a double-bass player at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, gaining its diploma in 1992. More recently he has applied his skills to learning the electric guitar, a part he has taken in several performances of his own work In a Silent Way.

The evidence, therefore, is of a composer gifted with patience in his search for identity and an authentic voice, who in the best professional tradition ? Nielsen, Dvorak, Bach ? has learnt his craft in the school of actual doing. Engaged with musicians making music, he has since 1993 also created a corpus of works that range from solo instrumental pieces to orchestral and choral essays. The four items in this collection, the fruit of residencies with the Esbjerg Ensemble from 2004 to 2005 and from 2007 to 2008, are the most recent testimony to his adventure in composing ? begun at an age when many a former wunderkind might already be showing critical symptoms of running on empty.

How Olsen himself has met the challenge of style and idea in our contradictory times the scores themselves reveal. Over and above their individual impressions, they impart collectively the vision of a composer for whom fantasy and eclecticism are neither a self-conscience rejection of modernism, nor the floundering of those who, credulous of post-post modernism, can believe in anything. Instead, knowing his own intentions, he has embraced whatever he deems fit for his purpose, whether versions of the infinity series of Per Nørgård, or Boulez-like cell forms or other aspects of complexity. Nonetheless, he is also no stranger to experimentalism, as his original attitude to titles and (writer beware!) the role of words about music confirm. The result has been an exciting and unpredictable oeuvre that looks to the future through an undogmatic review of the recent past.