SAMPLEDØKSE is the Backwoodz record where four avant-garde musicians hand the mic to rappers
Savannah Harris, Mette Rasmussen, Val Jeanty and Petter Eldh built the band. billy woods, ELUCID, Maassai and Cavalier came along for the ride.
ØKSE is not a rap album with live instruments bolted on. It is an experimental jazz band — an international one — that invited four rappers into a record already in motion.
The band
- Savannah Harris — drums, New York
- Mette Rasmussen — saxophone, Denmark
- Val Jeanty — electronics, Haiti
- Petter Eldh — bass, synths and sampler, Sweden
Each is an established solo artist. Together, per the label, they mine new ground and push at the edges of genre rather than settling into any one of them.
The guests
ELUCID and billy woods — Armand Hammer — plus fellow Brooklynites Maassai and Cavalier. All four are writers who can bend an unstable track to their will instead of waiting for a loop to arrive.
The name
ØKSE means axe in Danish. Backwoodz leans into the layered meaning: the axe as one of humankind's oldest tools, and axe as Ashe — the life force running through all things, a current an initiate can channel and ride. That is a fair description of how the record actually moves.
Why it matters for the label
Backwoodz has released jazz-adjacent work before, from Kenny Segal's Human Error Club sessions to Preservation's sample-based collages. ØKSE is the furthest out, and the clearest statement that the label is not a rap label with a side interest — it is a label for difficult music that happens to have rappers on it.
The ØKSE page, with press photos and formats, is here (opens in a new tab).