It is difficult to comprehend that Andreas Engström is no longer with us. Just a couple of months ago, he wrote – as he had done so many times before – with an ambitious proposal: he wanted to review a box set of twenty releases by Dror Feiler. In the same message, he mentioned plans to come to Aarhus for the recently concluded Spor Festival.

The stage was set for a special experience on Wednesday evening at KU.BE on Frederiksberg. In the borderland between tradition and joyful madness stood birthday celebrant Kasper Tranberg, blowing his trumpet. What emerged was an insistent blend of jazz and avant-garde, laced with understated humor and delivered by a virtuoso with a calm, unmistakably Danish presence. With a wry sense of ease, he made even the most complex passages surprisingly accessible.

Tranberg presented excerpts from 12 Melodic Illusions for Solo Improviser and Melodic Illusions for Sextet with both devotion and a glint in his eye. He demonstrated how the trumpet can stand alone while still conveying abstract emotional states. Sharp trills dissolved into growling undertones, merging with the resonance of the room. At times, he employed backing tracks, creating duets with himself.

The evening’s main attraction was the trio Mesmer – Emil Jensen, Victor Dybbroe, and Anders Filipsen – who performed works from their new piece Terrain Vague II, developed through several residencies in Northern Jutland. The three compositions moved within a field of electroacoustics, contemporary music, and analogue improvisation, carrying a distinctly cinematic and nature-infused sensibility. The sonic plunges into the Limfjord were particularly striking: Dybbroe’s metal percussion and Filipsen’s lapping synth textures carved out a dark, magnetic space. In the piece inspired by Aalborg Harbour, Jensen’s trumpet cut through with long, mist-laden tones, like signals drifting in from distant ships. The result was both enchanting and, at times, deeply inspiring. It was a concert that, for now, refuses to loosen its grip on me.

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek

The ocean as Cape Lonesome, as a graveyard where at midnight the mythical, the real, and the endangered rise from the dead: this is the sonic world of Ghosts Beneath the Brine, the new album by Amsterdam-based experimental duo Wanderwelle.

Across eight tracks suspended between elegy and requiem, the album navigates the reality of climate change and species extinction while invoking the mythology of creatures of the deep. To sound the crisis, Wanderwelle chose not to record melting icebergs or raging wildfires. Instead, they submerged cymbals – small, bowl-shaped metal plates used since ancient rituals – in saltwater for extended periods. As the metal degraded, its sound grew darker, more fragile, more unstable, releasing ghostly overtones.

Those tones drift through the album like the critically endangered albatross – to which the sixth track is dedicated – spreading its 3.5-metre wingspan like a ghost across vast, indifferent skies. Layered with reverb and sounds evoking lamenting, whimpering animal voices, the pieces carry titles that weave myth and ecological reality: »The Seabishop's Sermon« (named after a creature allegedly caught in the Baltic Sea in 1513), »Empty Net or Dissolving Souls«. The message is clear: sharks and oysters risk becoming as mythical as sea monsters once were, if destruction continues.

And yet this is precisely where the album's beauty becomes its limitation. Ghosts Beneath the Brine sounds hauntingly gorgeous – but like the sublime spectacle of a shipwreck witnessed from a safe distance, it invites us to shudder rather than act. More ghost train than alarm bell, it offers catharsis where the moment calls for urgency.