Norway
Kieron Tyler
The opening moments don’t suggest what’s coming. A solo flute is followed by a few spoken phrases from a treated voice. What’s being said? It’s impossible to work it out. Is it a warning? An electric guitar’s strings are stroked with a cello bow. Then, other instruments enter the picture – shimmering electric piano, a trio of saxes, pitter-pat, raindrop percussion, throbbing bass guitar. About five minutes in, a pause arrives after which hard-edged spiralling guitar tops a swirling musical vortex. The storm has arrived. A squall is in the air, and on the stage.“Sun on a Dark Sky” is the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bergen’s Electric Eye’s pithy description of themselves is “psych-space-drone-rock from Norway.” They also say they “play droned out psych-rock inspired by the blues, India and the ever-more expanding universe.” Horizons is their fourth studio album.They’ve been honing what they do for just short of a decade. Their drummer Øyvind Hegg-Lunde has also regularly played with folk and jazz individualists Building Instrument and Erlend Apneseth Trio. Guitarist and keyboard player Njål Clementsen has been in post-rock/psych-rock bands The Low Frequency In Stereo and The Megaphonic Thrift. Amongst Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Phantasmagoria, or A Different Kind of Journey instantly sets its controls for an excursion into the interstellar void between gaseous and solid objects. Opening cut “Intoxication” begins with lightly pulsing bass and a keyboard texture. Shimmering guitar floats over the top. Though more sparse and lacking vocals, it’s as if Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them” were performed by an earlier model of the band which had focussed on reducing performative grandeur as much as possible.There’s another evocation. When “Intoxication’s” treated guitar arrives, it has a Robert Fripp flavour. The King Crimson Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s perhaps unfortunate that The North Water arrives on BBC Two only a few months after The Terror, since it’s impossible to avoid the parallels between them. They’re set only a few years apart (1859 for The North Water, 1845 for The Terror), both involve doomed voyages into Arctic waters, and each of them gets darker and bloodier as it depicts man’s inhumanity to man (and not just man) and the encroaching horror of a heart of darkness.But there are differences, too. The North Water is based on Ian McGuire’s novel, but this five-part series is indelibly stamped with the mark of screenwriter Read more ...
David Nice
Let the facts – and the music-making you can see and hear online – speak for themselves first. Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä became the Oslo Philharmonic’s chief conductor last September, at the age of 24; he takes up the same post with the Orchestre de Paris in September 2022, and is artistic advisor with both orchestras. In conversation, as on the podium, he is engaging, courteous, mature of thinking and willing to have a real conversation, as he so obviously does with his players. When we spoke last autumn, he was grateful to be working every week, and to be conducting in front of live Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Arrival Of The New Elders is unlike anything Norwegian trio Elephant9 have done before. Previously, their jazz-prog mélange was as full-on as it could be. Attacking, hard and heavy. Now, a previously unfamiliar pensiveness has been revealed.While Elephant9’s sixth studio album still sounds like keyboard player Ståle Storløkken, bassist Nikolai Eilertse and drummer Torstein Lofthus, there’s a more measured, clearly less improvised approach. Tempi are slower and the interplay between the players is easier to discern. There’s a new space too. Storløkken plays more electric piano than before, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Even before going to art school, Tracey Emin discovered the work of the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch. And even though he was born 100 years before her, she embraced him as a kindred spirit. One can see why. Whether painting figures, buildings or landscapes, Munch projects onto his subjects the intense feelings of desolation, loneliness and abandonment which haunted him most of his life.When he was just five, his mother died of TB, his favourite sister following nine years later. Brought up by a neurotic father obsessed with death, he recalled an unhappy childhood in which, “The angels Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Artists’ management Harrison Parrott has started a concert streaming platform called Virtual Circle on emusiclive.com, launched two days ago and only available as a live event - no catch-ups. Watching its debut concert - the Oslo Philharmonic with the much-buzzed-about Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä - it struck me that it must be terribly difficult to film an orchestra effectively. Ah no, responded a friend in the know: it’s actually easy, but you have to go with how the music feels, not what it is doing. I wish someone had told the camera directors of this otherwise admirable Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The term electro-pop has kind of lost its meaning, The Top 20 has, for many years, been full of music created on computers, from Charli XCX to BTS to Clean Bandit. Yet still, as a genre header, it's often used to refer to music that riffs on the sound of the 1980s synthesizer pioneers. The music of Norwegian singer Annie has tended in this direction but her latest album, only her third in two decades, is even more explicitly in this vein. It is a bright, engaging affair, given emotional heft by her trademark melancholia.Annie appeared amidst the millennial focus on the Norwegian city of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ole Bull: Stages of Life Annar Follesø (violin), Norwegian Radio Orchestra/Eun Sun Kim, with Wolfgang Plagge (piano) (2L)Schumann thought that the Norwegian violinist and composer Ole Bull (1810-1880) was as accomplished a player as Paganini, A child prodigy, Bull achieved global fame, one of those 19th century musicians who seemingly knew everybody. Berlioz, Grieg and Rossini were fans, and Bull’s ownership of Bergen’s leading theatre gave Ibsen the chance to start his theatrical career. Bull’s belief that Norwegian folk melodies were as worthy as any in mainstream European art music, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Turnamat is a type of washing machine made by AEG. In the composition titled “Turnamat”, Seventies-type synths, wobbly keyboard lines and hard-grooving drums give way to a brass-led interlude suggesting an acquaintance with the compositions of Lalo Schifrin. It’s as if a jazz-inflected soundtrack from 45 years ago has been shoved into a blender rather than a washing machine, then reconstituted and given a major buff-up. “Turnamat” is by Skarbø Skulekorps, an oddball Norwegian jazz outfit.“Surrender” is as impactful. On this, over just-short of five minutes, the sax player Bendik Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Norwegian singer Solveig Slettahjell has a feeling for slow. Her 2001 debut album was called Slow Motion Orchestra, and in the years since then she has turned her very fine sense of how to convey the essence and the meaning of songs at a very measured pace into her calling card.She has explained what draws her to slowness: “When I slow down the tempo, I can hear the sound in the words, there are so many little details when you play and sing slowly. These little details fascinate me.”In the early days when she was taking on the mantle of Norwegian jazz singers such as her teacher Sidsel Read more ...