Jan Bang, Erik Honoré - Electronics, Samples
Jon Hassell, Arve Henriksen - Trumpets, Electronics
Lars Danielsson - Bass
Sidsel Endresen - Voclas
recorded live at Punktfestival Kristiansand/Norway, September 3, 2010
1. The Drug Mule/ Self Injury (Jan Bang/ Arve Henriksen)
2. ...and Poppies from Kandahar Suite (The Midwive´s Dilemma/ Who Grooms The Child?/ Passport Control) (Jan Bang)
…And Poppies From Kandahar, Jan Bang’s first album under his own name, evokes a powerful sense of place – but it’s not a place you would recognize, or ever expect to find. A descendent of Jon Hassell’s “fourth world” concept, it sketches scenes of struggle and malice, in locales both primitive and urbane. As a producer, Bang stitches it together like a patchwork atlas and then makes the seams disappear: live recordings and studio constructions, old samples and new solos come together to form an exquisite whole.
Bang recruits a cast of collaborators from Norway and beyond, who will be familiar to anyone who’s followed his recent productions: trumpeter and vocalist Arve Henriksen, whose albums Cartography and Chiaroscuro were co-produced by Bang; the stunning vocalist Sidsel Endresen, whose captivating turn on “The Midwife’s Dilemma” grows out of a moan and a half-croak; and samadhisound founder David Sylvian, who wrote the titles for each piece and the album as a whole, setting these abstract scenes in a disruptive context.
This is music of the world, but it’s rooted in Kristiansand, Norway, Bang’s home and workplace. His musical career began in the late ‘80s, when he cut his first albums in a synth-and-vocals duo with Erik Honoré. By the ‘90s he was a producer of Norwegian pop acts, when pianist Bugge Wesseltoft invited him on stage with an improvising ensemble. “I had the idea of using musicians as ‘input’ to my sampler instead of vinyl,” recalls Bang. “We called it ‘live sampling.’ I found it appealing to work in a live situation with improvised music where things change at the blink of an eye … . I was able to work in past, present and future, according to what the other musicians were doing and how they reacted to what I was throwing back into the mix.”
Bang recruits a cast of collaborators from Norway and beyond, who will be familiar to anyone who’s followed his recent productions: trumpeter and vocalist Arve Henriksen, whose albums Cartography and Chiaroscuro were co-produced by Bang; the stunning vocalist Sidsel Endresen, whose captivating turn on “The Midwife’s Dilemma” grows out of a moan and a half-croak; and samadhisound founder David Sylvian, who wrote the titles for each piece and the album as a whole, setting these abstract scenes in a disruptive context.
This is music of the world, but it’s rooted in Kristiansand, Norway, Bang’s home and workplace. His musical career began in the late ‘80s, when he cut his first albums in a synth-and-vocals duo with Erik Honoré. By the ‘90s he was a producer of Norwegian pop acts, when pianist Bugge Wesseltoft invited him on stage with an improvising ensemble. “I had the idea of using musicians as ‘input’ to my sampler instead of vinyl,” recalls Bang. “We called it ‘live sampling.’ I found it appealing to work in a live situation with improvised music where things change at the blink of an eye … . I was able to work in past, present and future, according to what the other musicians were doing and how they reacted to what I was throwing back into the mix.”
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