After the Wildfire documents an orchestral commissioned work of Norwegian live sampling and electronics player Jan Bang and trumpeter and vocalist Arve Henriksen for the Skopje Jazz Festival for its 42nd edition in 2023. This composition was first performed in Skopje with the FAMES Institute Orchestra and Macedonian voices, arranged and conducted by Džijan Emin.

The album After the Wildfire develops this composition further, based on its premiere recordings. Bang,  Henriksen, with guitarist and electronics player Eivind Aarset, and percussionist Ingar Zach, with new studio recordings made at Punkt Studio, continued to shape the dialogue with the FAMES Institute Orchestra and Macedonian voices. They created an eight-movement suite that juggles between ambient, minimalist, and dreamy soundscapes and the symphonic, between the live performance and the studio recordings, and the collective and the intimate.

This suite is described as «a meditation on the strength of nature against the impermanence of human endeavour, a sound-poem in the shadow of poet Percy Shelley’s «Ozymandias» (which is the Greek name for the pharaoh, exploring the ravages of time and the oblivion to which the legacies of even the greatest are subject)». This suite evokes poetic, dream-like, and vivid synesthesia-like images and loose narratives that transform the listening experience into an immersive, haunting one, weaving exotic, folkloric, and futuristic tales and rituals that linger on long After the Wildfire and what survives after the fire.

Eyal Hareuveni

Arve Henriksen (trumpet, voice), Eivind Aarset (guitar, electronics), Ingar Zach (percussion), Jan Bang (live sampling, electronics) Fames Institute Orchestra, orchestrated and conducted by Dzijan Emin, Vera Josofovska Miloševska (lead vocals), Anastasija Ilievska (backing vocals), lovana Bogdanoska (backing vocals), Milan Ninkovič (cello), Mario Kuzev (tapan), Andrej Trajikovski (kaval, zurla), Robert Angelovski (kaval, zurla)