Finding Deep Space: A Conversation with Nils Petter Molvær

Although instruments like the Teleharmonium plugged in as early as the late Nineteenth Century, it was not until the 1970s that electronic sounds would meet the depths of human improvisation-based music by the name of jazz. At the height of fusion, synthesizers added to the works of Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Weather Report, and others. But, even here, new technology primarily provided additional colors to add to otherwise complex surroundings. It would not be for another two decades that jazz and electronic music would truly form a cohesive whole in the form of “jazztronica.” Also called “nu jazz” or “future jazz,” the nascent style of the 1990s came out of Europe as a fully realized form that took the beats, loops, and samples of electronic music and married them with improvisational prowess. Of this school of artists, two -both Norwegian- stood out for their skills in maintaining the free ethos of jazz while embracing new technological developments: Bugge Wesseltoft and Nils Petter Molvær. The latter’s debut recording, Khmer (ECM, 1997), is particularly noted as a seminal work in the area. Given this status, any revisitation of the work by the trumpeter, as on KHMER (Live in Bergen) (Edition, 2025), his first live album in twenty years, is worth a listen. 

Captured at a 2023 concert in Norway’s second most populous city, Live in Bergen is in some ways a continuation of Petter Molvær’s original Khmer. The songs and instrumentation –  the leader’s horn with a bass, two percussionists, and sampling – of both records are largely the same. Two musicians – guitarist Eivind Aarset and drummer Rune Arnesen – even join Petter Molvær on both outings. Perhaps partly due to the shared instrumentation, both records also mine similar terrain at times. Both make judicious use of silence and heavy beats to propel the ensemble forward. The leader’s icily haunting trumpet remains. Hues of the record that broke new ground in an era of dial-up internet and pagers still sound wildly modern – futuristic, even. 

But it would be a mistake to call Live in Bergen an attempt at recapturing old glory. Just as he was back in the 1990s, Petter Molvær has spent the last two and a half decades keeping his eye towards the future and new ways of creating music. Those experiences invariably emerge in the Bergen performance, often giving a more dramatic rendition of songs than they were originally conceived. Throughout, Live in Bergen creates soundscapes richer and more developed than anything conceived on the original Khmer. It is essentially a soundtrack for navigators as they discover new lands.  The opening “Song of Sand” throws the listener into an arid desert with the low dub-influenced bass and manipulated trumpet evoking a band of camels crossing through the barren terrain and encountering unpredictable dust clouds – formed by Aarset’s treacherous electric guitar – as they endure onward. The wild whirls at the beginning of “Solid Ether” give way to Audun Erlien’s funky otherworldly bassline over which trumpet gently glides. Across it all, there is a vibrancy and energy not easily replicable in a studio.

Even with some of the same artists, same approaches, and same songs, Live in Bergen is a record wholly unto its own that shows that even decades after Petter Molvær’s Khmer broke new ground, he continues to expand the possibilities of where improvisation and electronics collide. We sat down with Nils Petter Molvær to discuss the origins of the original Khmer and how they led to the most recent incarnation. 

PostGenre: Going back, how did the original Khmer come together? You had ideas for the album as far back as the late 1980s, correct?

Nils Petter Molvær: Yeah, some of the themes and things I played with on the record I had previously worked on in a band called Masqualero. After that band, I played with some rock bands and improvised with DJs in clubs. But all of these things ended, and I wanted to make an album on my own. I decided that I wanted make something that organically integrated the things that I liked and have been doing musically into one expression. 

I started on the project that ultimately became Khmer by playing the bass, a lot of percussion, and, of course, the trumpet, all by myself. It was like a very long process to put it all together. Then I was asked to do a commission and decided that for it, I would ask other artists to join me on the project I was already working on. The first guy I asked was actually a light designer who provided visuals. We performed live, then went back and finished the recording in Oslo [,Norway]. I had initially hoped that the album might sell four or five thousand copies and we could use that to go on tour performing the music.

PG: Khmer ended up selling a lot more than only four or five thousand copies.

NPM: Yeah, I wouldn’t say the album’s sales exploded, but they definitely went much better than I ever could have imagined. Maybe some people can, but I am absolutely not capable of predicting something like that. It was like the world completely opened up. 

PG: Today, many people view Khmer as a pioneering album of “future jazz” or “nujazz.” Do you assign much significance to those labels?

NPM: No, I don’t have any thoughts on the terms “nu jazz” or “future jazz.” I’m not too concerned about genres or think about them at all. Ultimately, there is music I like and music I don’t like. Genre labels don’t really matter much to me. But I guess they are something that journalists might need to describe what they hear or labels need to sell music.  And that is totally understandable. But for me, it’s either music I like or music that doesn’t resonate with me. That is how I have always related to music, not labels.

PG: Back in the late 1990s, when you released Khmer, the idea of merging jazz and electronica was not as common as it is now.  

NPM: No. 

PG: Now that you are going back and revisiting the pieces on that album, do you feel your current perspectives are shaped by the work others have done in the years since to combine jazz and electronic music?

NPM: No, I don’t think so. I mostly see electronics as a tool that you interact with. Improvisation is basically the interaction between musicians. Interaction with other musicians is a much bigger thing to me than interacting with electronics. 

PG: Do you ever find that electronic effects make it is harder to get your voice out there? I mean, does it muddle your voice at all? 

NPM: Again, electronics are a tool. It’s like an expansion of me. I need to have my sound set first. When I work with electronics, things can get very loud. It’s good to have something that you don’t have to blow. I don’t like the sound of my trumpet when it is too brassy. I don’t want to sound like… 

PG: Maynard Ferguson. 

NPM:  Yeah, I mean, I listened to that music when I was a kid, but it’s not my voice. I much prefer the sound of a flute or the human voice. Both better reflect who I am, and electronics can help me get closer to those sounds. 

PG: What led you to revisit the music of Khmer?

NPM: The recent revisitation of Khmer came when the group that first commissioned me for Khmer told me they were celebrating their fiftieth anniversary and asked if I could revisit Khmer for them. I felt that doing so could be interesting and asked all the guys from the record if they would join me. They did, and we had great fun performing the commission. Of course, all of us had been playing in different settings for the last twenty-five years since we recorded Khmer. We have each developed and brought our development into the music when we played together. 

We ended up doing a few gigs together. I don’t know exactly how many, but we wanted to keep it kind of limited because it is a very expensive band to have on the ground since there are so many – up to nine – of us. So, since we reunited in 2023, I think we have done maybe fifteen gigs together, and they have all been great fun.

PG: And Bergen was one of those performances. 

NPM: So, we came to Bergen to play and it was recorded on multi-tracks. But I was incredibly sick on that tour. The day after our Bergen performance, I went to the emergency room at the local hospital and ended up in the hospital for two weeks. But there is something strange that happens when you play while you are so in the moment. You really don’t think about how you are feeling. You escape into the music.

We even did a gig last weekend. And there is potential for more. There’s potential for us to take the group wherever we want to go. I greatly enjoy playing with this group. But, then again, I also enjoy playing solo, with my trio, or in duos with other people. I just like to create music with other musicians, and that can take many different forms. 

PG: Going back to your comment on focus on human interactions, is that desire for human connection why you chose to have a drummer – actually, two of them – in the band instead of relying on drum machines?

NPM:  Ohh yeah. There is something special about a two-drummer band. We do use some loops and other things, but the use of two drummers is an important part of our sound. Loops can be cool, but they are very often static in a way. With a live drummer, there is a kind of conversation and interaction that I love. But then again, I also like to play with groups where it just goes into a transit thing. Khmer mixes the two, which is perfect for me. 

PG: Do you feel how you approach rhythm today has been shaped by the music you have done with Mino Cinelu, Sly Dunbar, or even Tabla Beat Science that digs deeper into rhythms from cultures across the globe?

NPM: Yeah, maybe. Things you work with in other projects certainly impact everything you do after them. But for me, the most important thing is to find deep space. To take space. So how I interact with rhythmic things is very much dependent on who I am playing with. Playing with Tabla Beat Science – which was a long time ago- or Mino or Sly and Robbie are all very different experiences. Of course, rhythm is very, very important. But, for me, it has a lot to do with when you start a phrase. When you add a phrase. And then, when you play a phrase,  how long you follow it and then let it go before you grab it again. I don’t know exactly how to explain this, but it’s much more of a feeling of not stressing or of being in the moment and in the groove. Sometimes you can really just leave the group and fly. It’s very difficult to say something very precise on this, but it’s about interacting, as all music is in my world.  

PG: Tied to your looking for space, the original Khmer makes great use of silence. Granted, part of that may be because Manfred [Eicher] produced it, and he loves using space and silence. But you can also hear the space and silence on KHMER (Live in Bergen). Is it more difficult to create that room for space around the notes live than in a studio?

NPM: Well, when we recorded Khmer, Manfred was in the studio for only one day. So, my guess is he didn’t have much impact on the album’s use of space. When we were working on the album, we ended up using a lot of time. I sent what we had to Manfred a couple of years before it came out, and he said that maybe we needed more focus, and that was very, very helpful to me. But I’m not sure how much he shaped the use of space itself.

But a live setting is a different kind of animal than in the studio. In Bergen, we played before an audience of close to two thousand people. That by itself gives an entirely different feeling than recording in the studio. I like working in both settings. It’s a bit like how I don’t eat only one kind of food or drink only one kind of wine. I like different kinds of wines and foods. It’s a totally different flavor to perform live. However, I must say I haven’t sat down and listened to the live album in a long time, so I don’t know how much space there is on it. 

PG: You can definitely hear it on the live record. 

NPM:  Live, you are so much less aware, as you are playing, of whether there is space. In the studio, you are doing different takes, and that process can create space for you. Playing live, you are very much in the moment, so it is more difficult to tell. But I’m going to listen to the live album and see for myself. I am about to go to Serbia in two days and will put it on my headphones and listen to it on the plane. 

PG: Do you typically listen to your music after it is released?

NPM: Not very much, no. In the process of making a record, especially if you work in the studio, you already hear each song maybe two thousand times before it gets to the final version.  At a certain point, an artist needs to let go and not overproduce their recording or question it too much. Listening back, you always find things you could have done differently. That was especially true for me with the original Khmer, where I made most of the musical decisions myself. But now, I rely more on the wonderful musicians I work with and include them much more in the process on every level. Again, that way, we are really interacting and creating something together. It’s not like I make something and then they come in and I tell them what to do when they do. It’s not like that anymore. 

PG: So the original Khmer was much more controlled?

NPM:  In a way, yeah. I was working on and off with a wonderful sound engineer [, Ulf W. Ø. Holand]. He was on the second floor of the Rainbow Studio, the same building in which Manfred always did things. We called his space “Over the Rainbow.” [laughing]. He was working on a lot of different things. 

And at some point, I took the music home. I listened –  this was the beginning of the ‘90s – and I had an Akai S1000 [sampler]. At the time, I could sample, with a floppy disk, about five seconds of sound. That seems like the Stone Age compared to what we can do now. Now, there are almost no limits. Back then, you had to work really hard to make things come together. Now, you have much more control over the technology and can do much more with it.

PG: So, do you feel the jumps in technology also make things easier or more difficult in terms of creating a song or album? You now have more opportunities to go in different directions, but it also runs the risk of creating too many options now that it’s so much easier to do things. 

NPM: The reality is a mix of the two. It all depends on how you approach things. Some young people whom I have been following for a while are doing very fascinating things with new technology. The Norwegian trumpeter Hilde Marie Holsen, for one, studied the software at the same time she studied trumpet. At some point, I’d like to dive a little more into newer electronics, because you always want to try to renew yourself. You want to expand a little bit and find other ways and other sound worlds. I have found some new stuff that I have been working on a little. For me, the important thing is that no matter how much electronics there are, they primarily serve as an expansion of the trumpet and its sound. But I have also gotten older, which makes it a little more difficult to get into new things.

PG: One thing that makes KHMER (Live in Bergen) great is how it takes the original record but moves the music into a different direction. The album is more than just Khmer before a live audience. 

NPM: Wow. Yeah. Thank you. 

PG: And part of those changes just come naturally from your own development as an artist. How do you feel you have changed the most musically since Khmer first came out two and a half decades ago?

NPM: I haven’t thought about it before, but I think the biggest thing is that now I play less. Especially compared to how I was in the 1980s when I was in Moscow, I play much less now. I try to give the music what I think it needs, and that seems to be fewer and fewer notes as time progresses. Maybe it’s just from growing older and getting more mature, but I try to play fewer notes rather than more. If I play something, it has to be something substantial, not just something I do to impress or whatever. I need to put more power behind fewer notes. 

‘KHMER (Live in Bergen)’ will be released on September 12, 2025 on Edition Records. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information on Nils Petter Molvær can be found on his website.