After the Wildfire is a kind of hybrid work. The initial suite of music derives from a live performance at the Skopje Jazz Festival – who commissioned it – in 2023, when Jan Bang (live sampling, electronics) and Arve Henriksen (trumpet, voice), plus guitarist Eivind Aarset and percussionist Ingar Zach appeared with the FAMES Institute Orchestra and Macedonian Voices, arranged and conducted by Dzijan Emin.
The album adds new recordings from Punkt Studio in Norway featuring three of the players: Bang, Henriksen and Aarset. Bang then mixed the various parts so that what we hear comes across as a near seamless whole characterised most of all by the signature sounds of Henriksen’s distinctive trumpet-timbre and the eerie, drone-filled sound-collages familiar from Bang’s own live sampling and programming preferences.
Like much of their previous work both together and separately, it’s hard to distinguish between sound and music or performance versus remix, not that this is any impediment to enjoyment. Individual themes or snatches of melody appear, briefly cohere then dissolve back into silence or background noise.
There are moments of great beauty amid unsettling fragments where orchestral strings or the ensemble’s ethnic instruments seem to be robbed of any context through digital manipulation. An irreducibly human element is retained through the use of the voices from the original performance, and the plaintiveness of Henriksen’s trumpet, whether played straight or recomposed through sampling and post-production.
It’s all thoroughly absorbing. Although divided into two sides of four individually titled pieces each, the album is so imaginative, and so seductive, that it’s difficult to not just submit and let the oceanic waves of sound lap over you. While there is a sense in which Bang and Henriksen’s customary methods – so revolutionary sounding when they emerged two decades ago – have now become a dependable genre, with their own repeated traits and iconography, After The Wildfire shows them at a real highpoint of achievement, perfectly in tune with their own muse, and the contributions of their collaborators.
