Nils Petter Molvaer – KHMER

A good 25 years ago, a spirit of optimism was spreading through the Norwegian jazz scene. A group of musicians around the trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær had begun to experiment with an aesthetically and stylistically wide-open improvised music. Above all, Molvær’s “Khmer,” which appeared on Munich’s ECM Records, is considered the starting signal for a development that ingeniously combined jazz, electronics, digital loops and samples, DJ and club culture. But this aesthetic and stylistic clash was especially exciting live on stage. There, a DJ demonstrated his sampling art and recorded the respective instruments, processed them sonically and remixed the respective song quasi in “real-time”. Above all this, Molvær’s trumpet sound rose, often blown in a very cloudy and muffled manner, as if he wanted to ironically break the cliché of the “Nordic Sound”. By the way, “Khmer” was the very first ECM record that was also released as a remix version. Since then, a lot has happened in the music scene – and it could be exciting to explore how the 25-year-old material can be reinterpreted with the means and possibilities of today, in order to now bring out the timelessness of this still extraordinary fusion of Molvær.