Punkt Editions presents Temporary Empire, the unedited live performance recorded at Punkt Festival 2025, bringing together Erik Honoré with trumpeter Eivind Lønning and percussionist Mark Wastell. Captured at Teateret in Kristiansand, the album documents a single, continuous concert encounter: voices reciting Honoré’s texts, electronics, trumpet, gongs, bells, drums and field recordings unfolding as one shared, time-bound structure.
The album is mixed by Erik Honoré and mastered by Stephan Mathieu. The CD edition includes the complete texts, liner notes and is exquisitly designed by Nina Birkeland.
Temporary Empire is a text-music work rooted in a specific historical moment and its long after-image. Its point of departure is the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967 and the so-called Yellow Fleet: fifteen commercial ships trapped in the Suez Canal for more than eight years. Cut off from nations, flags and normal routes, the crews formed a strange, provisional community – a micro-society sustained not by power or conquest, but by routine, care and invention. The title refers to this paradox: an “empire” that existed only through presence, patience and mutual maintenance, and that vanished almost without trace.
Honoré’s texts and musical framework weave together this historical material with personal memory, concrete objects and the fragile mechanics of remembrance – carved model ships, matchsticks, thread, stamps, names spoken and re-spoken. One of the caretakers of the stranded ships was his father, a connection that lends the work its quiet gravity and restraint.
On stage, Honoré’s electronics and live sampling form tense, slow-moving sound fields, intersected by Lønning’s abstract trumpet lines and Wastell’s tactile, resonant percussion – a music of suspension, friction and patience. Temporary Empire stands as a document of a particular night at Punkt, but also as a broader meditation on time, waiting, displacement and the quiet human labor of keeping things – even names – intact.
Not a war story. / A keeping story. / A binding of names to breath. / A way, even now,
to say: we were here.
The performance at Punkt 2025 drew strong critical responses:
“The suitably tense, austere soundscapes cohere potently with the whispery motifs of trumpeter Eivind Lønning and the circle of thudding low pitches and shimmering highs British percussionist Mark Wastell draws from a unique arsenal of drums, bells and gongs. Furthermore, the recorded poetry, with images of ‘tattered flags in the wind’, which could not be more relevant to the spread of St George’s flags in light of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the UK, is thought-provoking.”
– Kevin LeGendre, Jazzwise
“The music rises through sombre elegance, sketching out scenes for a film that can only be heard. The seven texts are both concrete and somewhat enigmatic, and they leave a real impression in this first encounter.”
– Arild R. Andersen, Jazznytt
“The experience comes alive before us; the feelings of alienation, longing, abandonment is powerful. They seize us. It is a story about belonging, about humanity, and about “the truth that empires fear: / that to remain is not the same as to conquer.”
– Johan Hauknes, Salt Peanuts
Artwork by Nina Birkeland