Fire! Orchestra

CD version. Fire! Orchestra debuts on We Jazz Records with Words, their new album out 22nd January, 2027. A major work of 13 tracks, Words sees a new Fire! Orchestra lineup building around the core founder duo of Mats Gustafsson and Johan Berthling, featuring Mariá Portugal, Sofia Jernberg, David Sandström (of Refused), Alex Zethson, Julien Desprez, Mette Rasmussen, and many more. The total strength of the current orchestra is 19 musicians, making it one of the most impactful collectives in creative music today.

Words, as the name suggests, is largely a vocal album by Fire! Orchestra. Starting out with “Drowned Beast”, borrowed from the catalog of the US band Thee Oh Sees (OCS), the album pulls no punches and shows no shortage of emotion or variation. If you need proof, just match the monumental opener with the whisper-delicate closer “Plywe Kacza”, a stunningly beautiful Ukrainian folk melody reimagined by the band and the track’s lead vocalist Sofia Jernberg. For the first time, a large part of the band shares composing duties, in addition to the founding duo. Mette Rasmussen, Mats Äleklint, Mariá Portugal, and more take their place in the composer community of Words, while the likes of free jazz legend Joe McPhee and environmental activist Greta Thunberg habituate the lyricists’ credit sheet. It’s all a genuinely collaborative effort, which is palpable in the joy and the energy of the music. Smaller group instrumental passages in between songs give the album its rhythm, contributing to a grand statement in the orchestra’s ever-evolving catalog, now 8 albums deep.

Mats Gustafsson says: "Changes are here! A new era is here for the Fire! community! A new drummer and singer, Mariá Portugal, is now working with the Fire! trio, and we're psyched about this radical and creative change leading towards new music perspectives within the heavy world of riffing with Fire! trio and Orchestra. A new 19-piece version of the Orchestra with heave focus on Words in all forms and matters. 12 creative female musicians and 7 men creating new radical music of noise and beauty together. After working with Rune Grammofon for 17 years, we are now moving on to a new collaboration with We Jazz Records. New perspectives and new music finding a creative platform together! Changes are here! Personally I couldn't see a better, more creative and FUN way to continue the Fire! legacy."

Swedish author Hedvig Ljungar writes in her liner notes to the album: “The interplay of sounds and words as expressed in the album Words is reminiscent of both early 20th-century surrealism and the concrete poetry of the 1960s, challenging the language of order by adding elements of disruption. Both of these movements investigated the boundaries between the signifying and the sonorous aspects of language, often including elements of “nonsense”. There are strong parallels with Fire! Orchestra’s artistic work. Through the album’s 13 tracks, the ensemble explores the uncategorizable and indefinable, while also challenging the notion of “sense”, or the voice of reason. And even though “sense” is a concept associated with those in power, Thunberg’s sampled voice repeats: ’The real power belongs to the people.’ Words ends with the Ukrainian folk song, “Plywe Kacza”. The lyrics depict a dialogue between a mother and her son before he leaves to fight in the war, and have served as a symbol of the soldiers killed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. An echo of Thunberg’s voice cuts through Sofia Jernberg’s as it rings out, shifts, and cracks. Her voice becomes that of everyone. What impact can art possibly have? What power does a voice hold? By pushing back against reality while simultaneously creating space for escapism and imagination, Fire! Orchestra generates a particular kind of knowledge, which cannot be attained in any other way than through the ensemble’s distinctive vocabulary. This kind of knowledge holds a fundamental possibility: to experience time and space in ways different from those that, in our quotidian life, seem to be the only ones available. That is Words. This is Fire! Orchestra.”

Words is released by We Jazz Records on 22nd January 2027 as ”Fire! Marbled” and black double gatefold vinyl editions, and on CD. Both physical editions come with full credits and liner notes by Hedvig Ljungar.