Mats Gustafsson’s Swedish three piece Fire! are teaming up with Jim O’Rourke for their second album. O’Rourke adds synth and electric guitar to the current trio: Mats Gustaffson on sax and Fender Rhodes, Johan Berthling on electric bass, and Andreas Werlin (one half of Wildbirds & Peacedrums) on drums.
The four track album, Unreleased, will be released on 4 July through Rune Grammofon. A red vinyl edition will be pressed in an edition of 100, available only on the Rune Grammofon site. Fire! play Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival with Oren Ambarchi in October.
(Google translated) “Fire! – This simple but evocative name for an underground power trio with Mats Gustafsson, Johan Berthling and the drumming half of Wildbirds & Peace Drums, Andrew Werliin, sounds already on the paper like a dream situation for the Swedish, currently wonderfully fluent, jazz and improvisation scene. You liked me five minutes ago (the enigmatic title comes from the American poet Robert Creely) is the trio’s debut, where we, in anticipation of the album with solo soprano, may be content to Gustafsson including strumming away on a Fender Rhodes piano!
Sometimes you get a bit puzzled over the Swedish music press. This is a band that should get much more attention than many other subtle oddities that fill the newspapers’ cultural coverage, especially since this is not any “serious” music. Hardly a word is written. Possibly because they’re at a Norwegian company, or that music includes a saxophone, a stinging fact that seems to be impossible even for a download strong indie audience.
Anyway. This is a band I of the above reason to celebrate blindly. But it is not easy. In short: music is brilliant, at times on the verge of goose bumps warning. It is a slow-but-safe development of heavy rhythm that same slow-but-surely enter the polyphonic overtures, sometimes as if Black Sabbath and Neu had shared rehearsal space in sober time. But in view of the musicians involved so I set high standards. It is this ‘slow-and-safe’ as the more omlyssningar forming a bitter. The project is too fast hopkommet, just not assented. It is music that is improvised, sure, but the form is conceived from the beginning. How does it feel in each case. It is a bit like that term “record collector music”, ie. playing a music that sounds like one’s own record collection: a little free jazz, some Sabbath, a little kraut … Sometimes, as if Cream was produced by Conny Plank … Nico shows up, humming and bikes for a while and headed out … (why can not she stay?)
I do not want to delude anyone that this album is one flounders, far from it. Again, it is really good. But still annoying when you hear that during all this, there is great potential that seems to be restrained.”