1 	Beyond My Control	5:18 		
2 	I.C.U.	5:07 	
3 	Just One of Those Days	4:25 	
4 	Picking up Pieces	5:15 
5 	The Cabinet	4:37 	
6 	Something Written	5:34 	
7 	Strange Noises	4:30 	
8 	The Telescope Man Says	6:15 	
9 	She Collects (Stuff Like That)	4:09 	
10 	Balloon Mood	3:24

Anja Garbarek – vocals, keyboards
Marius de Vries – keyboard, programming, vocals
Christopher Baron – choir boy
Andy Findon - flute
Frank Ricotti – marimba
Steve "Sputnik" Sidelnyk - percussion
Anthony Pleeth, Bill Hawkes, Boguslav Kostecki, Martin Loveday, 
Perry Montague-Mason , Peter Lale, Wilf Gibson – strings
Gavyn Wright - conductor [string section leader]

Anja Garbarek's "Balloon Mood" is the sort of album that shifts one's perceptions to the metaphoric and to the subjective. I sometimes find myself picturing the album as a pile of multicolored sticky sweets lumped into a crystal candy dish, of the sort one might find in the homes of lonely old widows.

The album's cover displays several identical snapshots of a mirthless young blond girl. This image is probably the reason for my further fantasy, imagining Anja's precious voice issuing from the lost soul of a porcelain doll condemned to the hell of an abandoned nightmare factory. The album's vivid blend of industrial music and electronica lies in fragments about the doll like dilapidated but magical machinery--machinery with no one to serve but her.

In this remote and confined soul-space, Anja's songs often have the eerie quality of an Emily Dickinson poem. Other comparisons come to mind as well. The psychedelic, wandering narrative of "Strange Noises" is very close to Ken Nordine's riff-based storytelling and the albums of "word jazz" that he has released over the past four decades. In "Picking up the Pieces," Anja combines her tragic surrealism with a dense, White Zombie style, cyber-metal drone with a chorus in baby-doll voice: "You took away my red lips / And cut them up in pieces / So now I can't kiss the moon / So now I can't kiss the moon goodnight / No longer fly, through the clouds / No longer touch, the stars."

All the best idiosyncratic elements of the album are pulled together in "The Cabinet." Here, Anja sings about a cabinet hanging above her bed ("filled with all my secret things"), at which she stares during the night. In the background, crowding her voice, all sorts of tiny sounds are at work, hinting at a parade of ceaseless activity. The song, like the whole album, suggests a worrisome thought--the notion that maybe a tribe of small, careful animals or shadowy mechanisms are forever creeping about at the back of one's unconscious mind. --- A. C. Walter, amazon.com

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1. Born That Way 
2. Dizzy With Wonder 
3. The Last Trick 
4. Sleep 
5. Shock Activities 
6. Yes	
7. My Fellow Riders
8. Can I Keep Him?
9. This Momentous Day 
10. Still Guarding Space 
11. Word Is Out

- Anja Garbarek / sax, vocals
- Gisli Kristjansson / organ, synthesizer, bass, guitar, percussion, drums, keyboards, programming, Theremin, xylophone, melodica, Handclapping, noise, wurlitzer, effects
- John Mallison / banjo, guitar, piano, programming
- Øyvind Brække / trombone
- Richard Cottle / Hammond
- Erland Dahlen / drums
- Miguel Diaz de Lopez / sampling
- Frode Haltli / accordion
- Kjetil Steensnæs / guitar
- Terry Thomas / guitar
- Godfrey Wang / piano
- Steven Watts / bass
- Bruce White / strings
- Gavyn Wright / strings
- Patrick Kiernan / strings
- Boguslaw Kostecki / strings
- Peter Lale / strings
- Cathy Thompson / strings
- Chris Tombling / strings
- Julian Leaper / strings
- Martin Loveday / strings
- Rita Manning / strings
- Perry Mason / strings
- Everton Nelson / strings
- Rachel Bolt/ strings
- Caroline Dale / strings
- David Daniels / strings
- London Session Orchestra / strings

Daughter of the Norwegian avant-jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek and, like her dad, something of a fusionista, with her fifth album (including the recent soundtrack to Luc Besson's Angel-A) Anja is unlikely to reap the commercial whirlwind of, say, Ravi Shankar's offspring Norah Jones. Yet buried within this 40-minute mismatch of breathy, slow-burn folk-chanson and dated electronica - the worn-vinyl beats beloved of yesteryear's samplers; the squelches, rumbles and other digestive noises Björk raised to an artistic apogee on the wonderful Homogenic - is one terrific song and a few near misses.

The chorus of The Last Trick rises on a thermal of triumphant wistfulness of which Madeleine Peyroux would be proud; the woodwind-driven This Momentous Day struggles inside a cacophonous metal arrangement; and such fragments as the micro-song Yes and the fade-out to Sleep all frustratingly suggest an engagingly dreamy songthrush who should be freed from an ill-fitting cage of her own misguided construction. ---Mat Snow, theguardian.com

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01. Her Room 
02. The Gown 
03. Spin The Context
04. Stay Tuned 
05. You Know 
06. Big Mouth 
07. The Diver 
08. That's All
09. And Then 
10. It Seems We Talk

- Anja Garbarek/ vocals, percussion
- The London Session Orchestra / strings (tracks 1, 4, 5, 8, 9)
- Laurence Pendrous / piano (tracks 1, 2, 7, 8), organ (track 4), Rhodes (track 6)
- Chris Lawrence / bass (tracks 1-3, 6, 7, 9)
- John Pigneguy, Richard Bissill / French horn (track 1)
- Steve Jansen / percussion (tracks 1, 2), drums (tracks 3, 4)
- John Bradbury, Ivo van der Werff, Tony Lewis, Tony Hinnegan / strings (tracks 2, 7)
- Mark Hollis / piano, electric bass, melodica (track 2)
- Melinda Maxwell / oboe (tracks 2, 7)
- Steven Wilson / guitar (tracks 2, 5, 10), percussion (track 3), piano (track 10)
- Martin Ditcham / percussion (tracks 2, 7)
- Nick Bucknall, Anthony Pike / clarinet (track 3)
- Tony Pleeth, Paul Kegg / cello
- Richard Barbieri / analogue effects (track 4)
- Jørgen Knudsen / atmosphere (track 4)
- Robin O'Neill / bassoon (track 5)
- Theo Travis / saxophone (track 6), flute (track 8), bass flute (track 10)
- Gavyn Wright / violin (track 6)
- Peter Lake / viola (track 6)
- Robert Wyatt / vocals (track 7)
- Helen Tunstall / harp (track 9)
- Frank Ricotti / vibraphone (track 10)

Anja Garbarek's third album -- and her first for a major label -- is a departure from her previous efforts in that she's enlisted the help of musicians who understand how to blend her electronic textures with more organic instrumentation. The daughter of ECM jazz saxophone legend Jan Garbarek, Anja has moved far from the distorted soundscapes of her debut, the elegantly weird Balloon Mood from 1996. Here she employs the talents and tactics of musicians such as Mark Hollis (formerly of Talk Talk), Richard Barbieri and Steve Jansen from Japan and Rain Tree Crow, respectively, and the production savvy of Steve Wilson from Porcupine Tree. Her sound is all but impossible to describe, but there are moments where the wispy, almost invisible vocal style of Stina Nordenstam echoes in the mix, as the does the lyrical irony of Laurie Anderson, and the broken poetic phrasing of Bjork. But this is no comparison, as shades and specters of different music such as jazz, classical, rock, trip-hop, and even dub waft through this airy mix, through all of them appear as ghosts, musics that are what we remember them as, from some near future emptiness, rather than as current constructs from which to make music from. There is the notion of observance, Garbarek is always the outsider, witnessing small occurrences in everyday life and reading who knows what into them. There is a duet with Robert Wyatt, entitled "The Diver," where besides a double bass -- present in every track -- there is little but a spare, lilting piano, some string, and an oboe. The pair's voices comment on witnessing the art of a diver's plunge. Their voices entwine and then separate, creating a view both from pool side and in Wyatt's case, distance. The up-beat trip-hop of "That's All," where drum loops engage a chamber group with bass; a flute slips and slides along underneath the listener like a ball rolling under the couch, almost moving by you before it can be grasped: "And he crawls to the door in a warm nurse/where he walks for the first time/surrounded by the dry clouds/he is leaving a trail/that's all we know." The next piece, the melancholy, "And Then," with nothing but a bass, the London Session Orchestra, and harpist Helen Turnstall, is at once a song of absence and arrival: "Unpack moments/the girl in the redcoat turns/passing. Entering. Going places/bring her name under the chain of lights/kneeling down/she throws herself into sound/passing. Entering. Going places..." In the broken lyric and shimmering instrumental quality we hear an artist emerging from her influences into a music of her own creation, shedding the pop influences of her past; in the process she is unearthing a signature music which turns in on itself before slowly opening to the listener in mysterious and wonderful ways. Smiling & Waving is an opaque, sensual gem. ---Thom Jurek, Rovi

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A1 	Questions 	1:15
A2 	Never Both (Theme) 1 	1:24
A3 	In Between 	5:27
A4 	Lazy Predator 	6:12
A5 	Heavy Forms 	5:14
B1 	Skilful Talker 	5:29
B2 	The Witness 	4:00
B3 	Never Both (Theme) 2 	0:18
B4 	Bossa Truck Fix 	5:27
B5 	Less Lonely 	4:44
C1 	Bob's Song 	6:12
C2 	The Will To Walk 	5:13
C3 	Vårbekk 	0:52
C4 	Confessional Memoirs 	5:45
D1 	Constant Clatter 	5:04
D2 	Never Both 	8:17

Keyboards, Arranged By – Jan Garbarek
Keyboards, Banjo, Accordion, Programmed By, Sound Designer – Kåre Christoffer Vestrheim
Programmed By, Keyboards, Vocals – John Mallison
Programmed By, Sound Designer, Keyboards, Guitar, Vocals – Nils Jakob Langvik
Viola – Bergmund Waal Skaslien
Vocals, Sound Designer – Anja Garbarek

Anja Garbarek returns with her first album in 13 years. The Road Is Just A Surface is a captivating blend of light and shadow, melody and drama. It is a story about the longing to move on.

The Road Is Just A Surface is the brand new album by renowned Norwegian artist Anja Garbarek. It is available in two editions, ?Red? and ?Yellow?. The Red concept album is a dazzling and sinister soundscape that stretches for more than 70 uninterrupted minutes. On the Yellow edition, the songs have been edited and remixed to offer a different route into Garbarek's melodic pop art.

The Road Is Just A Surface is a creative, kaleidoscopic journey through the human mind. Anja has written all the melodies and lyrics, as well as producing and arranging the material with Kåre Chr. Vestrheim (Highasakite, Motorpsycho, Marit Larsen). The fourteen new pieces tell the story of Bob, who has become trapped in the maze of his own emotions. The Road Is Just A Surface is an album that truly stands out, tearing down the veil covering the world of dreams. It is surrealistic pop at its best, with catchy songs such as "The Will To Walk", "The Witness" and "Lazy Predator". ---propermusic.com

Niech nie zmyli was to nazwisko. Anja Garbarek (jak sama na początku myślałam) nie jest polską wokalistką, której album gdzieś zagubił się podczas zachwycania się premierami The Dumplings czy Nosowskiej. Polskie korzenie ma, ale pochodzi z Norwegii. “The Road is Just a Surface” jest jej pierwszym od trzynastu lat albumem. Muzyka powstała z myślą o przedstawieniu teatralnym, ale bez obaw – to świetny, przemyślany alternatywny pop, który przybiera na jednym wydawnictwie kilka barw. Czasem Anja stawia na akustyczne aranżacje, innym razem zaprasza do współpracy orkiestrę. A chwilami pcha swoją twórczość w stronę trip hopu i jazzu. ---Zuzanna Janicka, the-rockferry.pl

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