Punkt Editions is proud to present With These Hands, a collaboration between Jan Bang and the Ensemble Modern.

A single sound begins - not as a command, but as a suggestion. From there, a world unfolds. With These Hands, the title track from this collaboration between Jan Bang and Ensemble Modern, moves like weather over shifting terrain: fluid, alive, always forming. Built from a series of open-ended modules, the piece invites the listener into an evolving soundscape: part score, part improvisation, part memory. Every sound feels physical. Instruments breathe, scrape, shimmer; the performers' gestures shape the music in real time, their bodies in conversation with the instruments. This is not composition in a traditional sense, but a space for listening and shaping, where sound is both structured and set free. Rather than layering, the piece creates spatial depth - a kind of sonic topography where each voice finds its own dimension. Caverns of resonance, filaments of breath, sudden fractures, glowing stillness. The music moves, but remains coherent, built not by uniform effort, but by many hands working attentively, responsively. With These Hands reflects the act of making: not monumental, but intimate. A process of care, craft, and continual release into open air.

As David Toop says in his sleeve notes to the album: “Languages of improvisation folded together and opened out like a Japanese orihon book, concerted effort, a collaborative composition of many hands, work as light as building an instrument that is air.”

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.

Composer/singer/producer Jan Bang is known for albums and live performances in collaboration with musicians like Jon Hassell, Sidsel Endresen, Tigran Hamasyan, Nils Petter Molvær, Arve Henriksen, Eivind Aarset and Erik Honoré. After a string of instrumental releases and two song based albums with the project Dark Star Safari, Reading the Air is his first vocal based solo album since 1998.

The album’s lyrical, lingering compositions, built around Bang’s voice, keyboards and electronics, are enhanced by an accomplished team: Vocalists Anneli Drecker, Simin Tander and Benedikte Kløw Askedalen, trumpeter Arve Henriksen, duduk player Canberk Ulaş, guitarist Eivind Aarset, bassist Audun Erlien and drummer Anders Engen.

Reading the Air is co-produced and mixed by Jan Bang's longtime partner and Punkt Festival co-founder Erik Honoré, who also wrote the lyrics – ambiguous meditations on loss and transience, with glimpses of hope and reconciliation: The title Reading the Air borrows a Japanese term that means "understanding the situation without words" or "sensing someone's feelings". Cover design by Nina Birkeland.

"Reading The Air" is released on Punkt Editions on January 19th 2024.

«Last Two Inches of Sky», released by Punkt Editions on 23 September, is an ambitious and engaging mixture of sonic painting and art-pop; a new high point in Eivind Aarset and Jan Bang’s collective output.

Aarset and Bang have collaborated since the early 1990s in constellations with, among others, Nils Petter Molvær, Bugge Wesseltoft, Sly & Robbie and Jon Hassell. «Snow Catches on her Eyelashes» (2020) was their first recording as a duo, an album that was widely praised, inspiring John Eyles of All About Jazz to write: «Aarset, Bang and company go from strength to strength, as does the Norwegian scene. Onward and upward.»

From the opening grand diptych of “Night Poles River” through its eight tracks, Dai Fujikura and Jan Bang’s The Bow Maker is an album of multidimensional musical movements – not in the conventional compositional sense, but in the sense of actual movement: the music is constantly active, enveloping the listener, surrounding them with evanescent sonic spaces.

Featuring Dai Fujikura on synthesisers throughout (apart from one piece, “Implanted Memories”, to which he contributes orchestral samples), alongside Jan Bang’s unique use of samples, sound processing, and programming, the album features an ever-changing cast of contributors. Eivind Aarset’s guitar moves between textural elements, broad warm glissandos, and brief interjections of unidentifiable sounds. Arve Henriksen provides his fluid trumpet playing and breathy falsetto vocals. Nils Petter Molvær’s trumpet provides different moods from that of Henriksen’s, despite sharing stylistic musical DNA. Kati Raitinen’s resonant cello on the title track creates an evocative textural contrast with the shifting sonic world around it. Tamami Tono’s Sho (a mouth organ, a Japanese traditional instrument) conjures a unique acoustic terrain that undulates and rolls through angular peaks and valleys.