Often in partnership with Jan Bang, Erik Honoré is a pioneer of live sampling, most famously in the pair’s Punkt festival, where concerts are immediately remixed, developing Bugge Wesseltoft and Nils Petter Molvær’s 1990s Norwegian electronic improv revolution. Sampled performances often obscurely survive on Honoré’s own albums as atmospheric mulch floating transmuted in synth-washed soundscapes. Triage gains thematic heft from poems by the likes of Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson and Honoré himself, as well as manuals for treating battlefield trauma. Like the album’s title, words hint at what we may wrest from a disturbed, chaos-prone world.

‘The Bone Setter’ begins in an eerie, miasmal electronic zone, with Mary Ann Spiegel’s affectless, android voice reciting the World War One report ‘Early Care of Gunshot Wounds’. The stately, orchestral-sounding ‘Prague’ contrastingly focuses on Molvær’s brightly elegiac trumpet, musicians’ intermittently solid presence adding grit to the gloomy atmospheric swathes. The voice of another frequent collaborator, Sidsel Endresen, is typically reduced to prehensile squawks on ‘In a Station of the Metro’ even as Arve Henriksen’s trumpet pierces with sinuous beauty. The mellowly ambient unease can be a drag, but ends with Bang’s sonorous, David Sylvian-adjacent recital of the hopeful title track.

Where Triage suggests a sepulchral terminus for Honoré and Bang’s early synth duo days, the simultaneous release of Punkt Live Remixes Vol. 2’s festival performances foregrounds Endresen’s vocal innovations, pushing beyond language into choked glottal wheezes and arcing wails. Remixed gigs feature the late Jon Hassell and organ icon Ståle Storløkken, but only Eténèsh Wassié’s Ethio-jazz ululations and Kati Raitinen’s slashing cello clearly penetrate Honoré and Bang’s dank electronic textures, confirming Endresen as the mesmeric, idiosyncratic star.