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Mats Gustafsson’s trio Fire! features saxophone, electric bass and drums and delivers stripped-down, hard-riffing punk jazz. The expanded version dubbed Fire! Orchestra is… the opposite of that. On this, their 2013 debut release, they are 28 members strong, pulling from the Scandinavian free jazz, avant-noise and underground rock scenes (among the four drummers is the late Thomas Mera Gartz of Swedish psych-trance legends Träd, Gräs och Stenar). The 45-minute piece they perform, recorded on Friday the 13th 2012 and spread across two LP sides, is a big, throbbing vamp – in addition to the aforementioned drummers, they had four bassists and four guitarists, baritone and bass saxophones, bass clarinet and tuba – with frequent Greek-chorus outbursts from an array of brass players and intense, caterwauling vocals from Mariam Wallentin and Sofia Jernberg. This is a sprawling jazz-rock experiment that will remind some listeners of early 1970s work by Carla Bley, or the one-off fusion big band Centipede. And it’s only the beginning of the Fire! Orchestra journey – they’ve made several more equally impressive albums since.
