CB3 - Live Sessions (The Sign Records)

CB3 was built for a room. Aeons Live Sessions is what they did when the rooms closed.

Charlotta’s Burning Trio — Charlotta Andersson on guitar, Pelle Lindsjö on bass, Natanael Salomonsson on drums — had just put out Aeons in February 2020, on The Sign Records, when the pandemic took the stage away. That mattered more for this band than for most. Their whole language is instrumental and unstable on purpose: heavy psych, space-rock drift, progressive pulse. Solos are improvised. Intensity shifts. The same song is never the same song twice. Studio Aeons was the map. The gig was the territory.

With nowhere to play, they captured the territory instead. Recorded live at Signalverket in Malmö by Truls Nilsson, Finn Pöpke, and Jesse Emmoth, Aeons Live Sessions (also billed Aeons Live Session) takes three favorites from the album and lets them run. Digital release January 15, 2021, on The Sign Records, with videos for every track; the 12-inch followed as a limited 180-gram pressing, white-and-black marbled, 300 to 500 copies depending on the run. About 28 minutes. No vocals. No crowd noise dressing it up. A session, not a bootleg.

The set is the climb from Aeons, loosened:

• Acid Haze — 12:15. The nine-minute studio centerpiece stretched into the longest burn on the record: down-tuned melancholy, Sabbath weight, then the Hendrixian wash given room to actually get lost.
• Sonic Blaze — 8:11. The first single and video. Patterns opening out, a little evil in the haze, progressive without turning academic.
• Warrior Queen — 7:36. The triumphant return, sweeping rather than crushed, still a jam rather than a recap.

Press line that still fits: stars above, evil below, and fire in between. A trinity at peace for aeons — except here the peace is the concentration, not the volume. Close your eyes, the band said, and drift. That is the correct instruction. Shared stages with Monolord, Kikagaku Moyo, Hällas, and Firebreather had already argued that CB3 peaks in person. This is the document of that argument made under lockdown: three songs, half an hour, and the proof that the studio versions were only the starting length.