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Artist: Arve Henriksen

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Arve Henriksen:

Arcanum

The Scandinavian project Arcanum brings together four artists all well-known to followers of music at ECM: Arve Henriksen, Trygve Seim, Anders Jormin and Markku Ounaskari. They’ve played together in many permutations over the years, but this is their first album as a quartet. Already hailed as a “Nordic supergroup” in some quarters, the designation hardly conveys the thoughtful, reflective quality of the improvising and the sensitivity of the interaction here, whether playing music composed in real time or taking a written theme to new places.

Ounaskari, Jormin and Seim were all working with folksinger and kantele player Sinikka Langeland when the idea of a new band was first raised: “We’d often play as a trio during soundchecks, which was always very enjoyable, so I proposed booking a couple of concerts in Finland….”, Markku recalls. Trygve felt Arve Henriksen also had to be in the line-up, a suggestion easily agreed to. All four of the musicians had played together on Langeland’s Starflowers album in 2006 and on her later recordings including The Land That Is Not and The Magical Forest, and the Seim/Henriksen association stretched back still further, with Arve already a significant presence on Trygve’s ECM debut Different Rivers, recorded in 1998 and 1999. From the earliest days it was evident that there was something special in the way that Seim and Henriksen were able to bend and intertwine their sounds on saxophone and trumpet.

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