Khmer Live in Bergen
(Edition)
7.5/10
The material revisited on this live album was a mini-tornado tearing through the music world in 1997. Who knew you could use loops, beats and samples and still make something called jazz? The influence of Khmer was and remains immense. Wander past the Opera Bar at Sydney Opera House and chances are you’ll hear an act that owes a debt to Norway’s Nils Petter Molvaer.
Khmer had tentacles in trip hop, drum and bass, ambient, ethno-groove and electronic dance music, yet it was none of those things. It was a trumpeter creating intriguing contexts in which he and his friends could improvise. It just happened to suit people who liked a side-order of drugs with their music.
This is not the first live version of Khmer, with a high-quality bootleg kicking around two decades ago, but this one’s more interesting, because, with the passage of time, not only has the personnel evolved, but also the ones who’ve stayed the course – Molvaer, guitarist Eivind Aarset and drummer/percussionist Rune Arnesen – have grown as artists. Molvaer has added a couple of new compositions and switched the running order, and, of course, the electronic technology has leapt ahead.
For those unfamiliar with the original album, this is Nordic noir, with menace hiding in every shadow. Contrast and surprise are Molvaer’s key tools, rather than complexity. The music can be as gentle as a light dusting of snow, his trumpet crying out a song of loneliness, frosted by the merest whispers of electronics. Then a back-beat groove kicks in, perhaps teasingly soft to start, before becoming a walloping thump to wake your neighbours’ neighbours. Aarset’s guitar features are great monoliths of sound that tower up out of the speakers and threaten to crush you.
Unlike the original album, he now has a specialist bassist in Auden Erlien and a second drummer in Per Lindvall, with the band completed by Jan Bang’s live sampling and DJ Pal “Strangefruit” Nyhus, who also handles programming.
Among the new pieces is Vilderness, built on a chunky bass ostinato around which the drums dance, while the others build layers of sound. This stratification is another hallmark of the music as a whole, and is a tribute to the band’s discipline and the expert mixing, whereby very soft sounds can be heard “through” louder ones. Sometimes, when the music’s at its loudest, the drama compounds as the square of the energy, yet with a marvellous sense that the players never let themselves fully off the leash. They’re Norwegians after all.
While rock bands routinely revisit old albums as festival events, it’s rare in jazz. Thankfully, this didn’t become an act of nostalgia, but one of making music that, in all senses, is in the present tense. Oh, and, if you turn it up, the sound will make you think you’ve just upgraded your system.
https://www.nilspettermolvaer.com/