Jan Bang & Arve Henriksen: After The Wildfire

Commissioned by the Skopje Jazz Festival and premiered at its 42nd edition in 2023, After the Wildfire was performed live in an evening marked by the dim glow of the stage, an orchestra breathing with the electronics, the wealth of sounds conjured by sampler Jan Bang, and Arve Henriksen's trumpet cutting through the hall like a quiet flame. The premiere offered an immersion into a unique sonic world. Now released as a physical album, the recording feels both familiar and freshly transformed—like the same landscape viewed at a different hour.

The album is built around an eight-movement suite, a careful weaving of live performance and studio work, though it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. At its heart are Bang's live sampling and electronics, Henriksen's trumpet and voice, Eivind Aarset's guitar and electronics, and Ingar Zach's percussion (Aarset wasn't at the SJF performance, but his presence is felt here). Layered over this intimate quartet is the FAMES Institute Orchestra, guided by conductor and arranger Dzijan Emin, meshed with Macedonian traditional vocals and sounds that seem to arrive from distant radio transmissions. It is a mix that could feel unwieldy, but here it balances delicacy with grandeur, intimacy with orchestral sweep. For those familiar with the Nordic electro-jazz aesthetic—that spacious, patient sound world ECM Records has long championed, or the spontaneous alchemy of Punkt Festival where many of these collaborations first took root—this album will feel like a natural extension of that tradition. But After the Wildfire does something distinctive: it transplants that sensibility into Macedonian soil, letting Balkan folk traditions bloom through the cracks of electronic ambience, orchestral washes, and jazz improvisation. The result honors many strands of music while creating its own distinct terrain.

"Seeing (Eyes Closed)" opens the album with a kind of paradoxical vision—the trumpet rises from the shadows of haunted pianola fragments, suggesting sight beyond sight. There is an immediacy to this sound, a tender questioning that pulls inward before the rest of the suite unfolds. From there, "Acacia" blooms warmly, with the unmistakable folkloric vocals of Vera Miloshevska Josifovska (of Luboyna fame) echoing in the distance, braided into electronic textures—a human pulse surviving in a vast sonic savanna. "Meridian Moon" is quieter, suspended, the kind of music that exists in liminal space, where time seems both to collapse and stretch. Some movements carry tension like an undercurrent felt beneath the skin. "Grassland" conjures wide, open plains, a low hum of life moving unseen beneath the surface—the sounds of kaval flute, didgeridoo, and cello emerging from the texture. "Halfway Between Noon & Sunset" introduces a mechanical heartbeat, precise yet haunted, a reminder that even in beauty there's an inexorable passage of time. Then comes "Pehlivan Fighters," an ecstatic and ritualistic track featuring the thunderous sounds of the traditional Macedonian tapan drum and zurla, before the album descends into the spectral "Abandoned Cathedral II." Here, architecture itself seems to collapse and fold in on memory, and the past converses quietly with the present.

Finally, "Remnants" lingers like sunlight on dark water, fragile and elusive—the afterimage of a fire that has passed. The album is not seamless. There are moments where orchestral weight and electronic experimentation almost pull against each other, where a breath catches and the direction momentarily blurs. The flow in most compositions is natural, but the content is rich, and the music resists easy navigation. It reflects a world both beautiful and fragile, scorched yet capable of renewal. After the Wildfire is less an album to conquer than a place to inhabit. It asks for attention, patience, and a willingness to follow sounds that shimmer, drift, and sometimes dissolve. For those who attended the Skopje premiere, the recording offers a memory refracted through new layers. For newcomers to this meeting point of Nordic spaciousness and Balkan intensity, it opens a terrain both strange and intimate—a quiet meditation on what lingers once the fire has passed.

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