FIRE! Vinyl & CDs

Review: Fire! (Mats Gustafsson, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin) is the eighth free improvisation opus by the Swedish experimental jazz group. In just a short space of five through-composed sonic reality tests, the album reads and plays back like a forty-minute affirmative exercise in shadow work, in which the deepest depths of a collective subject's unconscious mind(s) is explored and recalibrated. The approach matches: unlike prior projects, the album was performed and recorded live in the studio to analogue tape, with no flutes, no electronics, no guests and no extras. Contemporary jazz in its purest compositional nakedness, Fire! finds joy and reverence in the crude and the fetishised, with each instrument unfurling over time like Platonic forms of their truly nude, phenomenological counterparts.