Jan Bang and Arve Henriksen – After The Wildfire

Punkt Editions

Jan Bang and Erik Honoré‘s Punkt Editions label is a carefully curated selection usually involving Jan, Erik or both plus a cast of regular contributors. They push for sonic experimentation and the desire to merge live and studio recordings, and After The Wildfire, which was released towards the end of last year, found Jan teaming up with trumpeter Arve Henriksen, guitarist Eivind Aarset and percussionist Ingar Zach for a live performance along with the FAMES Institute Orchestra.

Originally commissioned for the Skopje Jazz Festival in 2023, After The Wildfire takes the familiar drifting folklore-influenced soundscapes and merges them with strings and voices for an unexpected journey. The album uses the live recordings as a basis and then re-imagines them in the studio, the distant piano and drifting trumpet immediately sending the listener off into a world where edges are blunted and the things softly reverberate.

It is the sound of dream containing a sense of lightness and mystery with landscapes taking on amorphous structures. The trumpet sound is unlike anything else and feels as though it is bridging the gap between speech and music, trying to make itself understood while around it indistinct textures hover. There are hints of strings disassembled in the æther, but the voices of Vera Josofovska Miloševska, Anastasija Ilievska and lovana Bogdanoska bring a feral warmth to the proceedings. It still feels as though we are adrift, mist preventing us from seeing the horizon and the voices calling, drawing us onward.

The voices only appear briefly, and further textures take their place with a rhythmic sway on “Meridian Moon”, taunting the disorienting trumpet; while “Grassland” is pure drift, but enlivened by the sudden arrival of strings that ruffle the calm surface. The sinister depths and heightened shrieks are an antidote to the trumpet’s equanimity as it descends into a half-life that is almost solely breath, the rest waiting close to at a standstill as the tension rises.

It is like listening through gauze and I am unable to fully understand how the sounds are made. With Arve and Eivind also credited with electronics plus Jan’s sampling, the sounds are subject to all sorts of manipulation to a point where I don’t spot Arve’s voice and barely hear Eivind’s guitar and sounds take a myriad of forms, raising a sense of intrigue and expectation.

“Pehlivan Fighters” is the complete antithesis of what came before, a brief blast of noise motion and feral tribal energy, the heat and dust and smell of the campfire almost tangible as horns carouse and voices yell. It feels like a reminder of times past before the storytelling trumpet takes up its position again. There are hints of keyboard and the guitar emerges blinking into the half-light as we are subsumed by the lullaby tones.

After The Wildfire ends with “Remnants”, where the sounds are mere suggestions rippling in the background, a gaseous distillation of all that has come before. Once again Punkt offer something which is liminal yet contains hidden depths. The more you listen, the more becomes apparent, its addictive nature inescapable.

-Mr Olivetti-