Bang, Jan & Arve Henriksen - After the wildfire CD

Commissioned by the Skopje Jazz Festival for its 42nd edition in 2023, After the Wildfire — the new album by Jan Bang and Arve Henriksen — was first performed in Skopje with the FAMES Institute Orchestra and Macedonian voices, arranged and conducted by Džijan Emin. That premiere revealed a music that hovered between genres, at once ambient, folkloric, and symphonic, “with its main feature being innovation and creativity,” as Nenad Giorgevski wrote.
The album itself grows directly from those premiere recordings. At its heart is the quartet of Bang (live sampling, electronics), Henriksen (trumpet, voice), Eivind Aarset (guitar, electronics), and Ingar Zach (percussion), their elemental dialogue set within the orchestral textures shaped by Emin and the FAMES musicians. To this foundation, new studio recordings made at Punkt Studio were later added — including “Seeing (Eyes Closed),” “Halfway Between Noon and Sunset,” and “Remnants” — featuring Bang, Henriksen, and Aarset. The result is a work that moves between live and studio, collective and intimate, each piece emerging as a scene, an apparition, a fragment of survival: the sound of performance transformed into lasting resonance.