Rediscovered sounds of technological trip jazz

Out of the dissolution of the Copenhagen indie rock band How Do I came not just Anders Remmers' electronic projects Dub Tractor and Future 3, Peter Fjeldberg's Double Muffled Dolphin, and the now somewhat legendary label April Records.

Holten Fjeldberg’s sound could be said to resemble contemporary names like the Belgian ensemble Echt! or The Cinematic Orchestra. But Holten Fjeldberg created these tracks 30 years ago, after Fjeldberg left How Do I. From then on he dove deep into the ambient genre as Double Muffled Dolphin, while simultaneously collaborating with How Do I bassist Hans Holten Hansen — who had picked up a double bass to explore bebop. Together they took on a more jazz-inflected investigation of the encounter between sampler and double bass.

Now the two have rediscovered 14 of the wav files they created long ago — featuring guest appearances by the saxophone of T.S. Høeg, the trumpet of Ole Reimer, and the electric guitar of Jesper Caprani. They were released on May 29, 2026, as the album Surfaced.

Is it jazz that came out of Holten Fjeldberg's computer?

The Holten Fjeldberg sound is a digital lattice carefully garnished with organic fragments of living, playful musicians. A timeless mechanical pulse brought to life by analog shards. A universe opens where Hans Holten Hansen's double bass, Peter Fjeldberg's samples, beats, and processing of the hand-played and wind-blown contributions weave an organic pulse into digital textures — threads of insistent traces of life in the space between 0s and 1s.

Some of the track titles flirt with the legacy of jazz from over 50 years ago. "Waltz for Hippie," "Tonight in Amnesia," "Thirdland." They are rendered in dense, cinematic soundscapes that also nod to the British trip-hop scene of the '90s, but with an unmistakably Nordic cool. Elsewhere, raw guitar textures or sketch-like ostinatos wrestle with the precise beats. This is music that dares to linger in the pauses and the imperfect, and that prioritizes mood over entertainment.

From back then to nu-jazz

In the 1990s, the boundaries between genres collapsed. Copenhagen was a hub at the crossroads of the electronic and the acoustic — a time and place where you could be an indie rocker by day and a jazz nerd or techno raver by night. It was in this melting pot that these tracks were born.

That they are seeing the light of day — meeting today's ears — right now is far from being a purely archaeological project. In recent years we have witnessed a massive resurgence of "hand-played" electronic music and a wave of nu-jazz drawing heavily from hip-hop's beat aesthetic. We are free of the era when choosing between sax or sampler was a statement of allegiance in a conflict between the digital and the organic. In Holten Fjeldberg, we hear the attentive and playful meeting of equal instrumental voices, live and programmed alike. Together they created a sound that is more relevant than ever.