Arcanum

The Scandinavian project Arcanum brings together four artists all well-known to followers of music at ECM: Arve Henriksen, Trygve Seim, Anders Jormin and Markku Ounaskari. They've played together in many permutations over the years, but this is their first album as a quartet.

What reaches the listener first is the thoughtful, reflective quality of the improvising and the sensitivity of the interaction — whether the four are playing music composed in real time or taking a written theme to new places.

On the quartet's debut album, recorded at The Village Recording in Copenhagen in March 2023 and produced by Manfred Eicher, sixteen concise pieces move between composition and improvisation, tradition and modernity, Nordic melancholy and a quieter, almost Far Eastern stillness. The playing is remarkably economical: nothing is overstated, nothing is given away.

Trumpet, saxophones, double bass and percussion draw on decades of shared language to build, in real time, music that is at once airy and form‑conscious, fragile and fulminant, free and coherent. The conversation continues live on stages across Europe.

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