Norway
Karl Ove Knausgaard: So Much Longing in So Little Space review – smiles more than screamsSunday, 24 March 2019
Around the works canteen, a dozen huge wall-paintings depict, in bright cheerful colours spread across radically stylised forms, happy scenes of women and men at work and play beside a sunlit sea. They till, pick, dance, chat, dream, wander or water... Read more... |
CD: Sigrid - Sucker PunchThursday, 07 March 2019
You’d be forgiven for thinking, in the age of streaming, that the promotional single was a dying art. And yet there’s already something familiar about Sigrid’s long-awaited debut album. It’s almost two years since “Don’t Kill My Vibe” was the song... Read more... |
CD: Susanna & The Brotherhood of Our Lady - Garden of Earthly DelightsTuesday, 19 February 2019
Lyrics such as “are we hunting for life among misery, Satan have pity on my long distress” and “we’re on a ship of fools, sails laughing and singing to hell” telegraph that, as a commentary on the present, Garden of Earthly Delights isn’t painting a... Read more... |
The Lady from the Sea, Print Room at the Coronet review - freedom to choose?Monday, 18 February 2019
Ellida (Pia Tjelta) has a choice to make, the outcome of which will bind her future to her past or her present, each represented by a man. On the one hand, there is the tempestuous seafaring Stranger (Øystein Røger) to whom, long ago and in a fit of... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Hedvig Mollestad, Norway's bridge between heavy metal and jazzSaturday, 19 January 2019
Norway’s Hedvig Mollestad Trio reset the dial to what jazz fusion sought to do when it emerged, and do so in such a way that it’s initially unclear whether they are a jazz-influenced heavy metal outfit or jazzers plunging feet-first into metal.... Read more... |
CD: Kim Myhr - Pressing Clouds Passing CrowdsMonday, 26 November 2018
If a new soundtrack for L'Année dernière à Marienbad was needed, Pressing Clouds Passing Crowds is it. Thematically, the collaboration between Norwegian guitarist Kim Myhr, French-Norwegian poet Caroline Bergvall, the Québécois string quartet... Read more... |
Erik Poppe and Andrea Berntzen: 'When white young men do stuff like this, we just shake our heads'Friday, 26 October 2018
On 22nd July 2011, on a tiny island off the Norwegian coast, 69 young people were killed, with another 109 injured in a terrorist attack. It was the darkest day in Norway since World War Two, and one that is still evident in its news, politics and... Read more... |
The Wild Duck, Almeida Theatre review - meta, merciless and altogether brilliantThursday, 25 October 2018
Beware the smile that Edward Hogg wears like a shield in the opening scenes of The Wild Duck, the Ibsen play refashioned into the most scalding production in many a year by Robert Icke, here in career-surpassing form. Playing James Ekdal, the... Read more... |
CD: Jessica Sligter - Polycrisis: yes!Sunday, 30 September 2018
The voice of Jean-Claude Juncker does not habitually turn up on albums. Jessica Sligter's Polycrisis: yes! though features extracts from a 2010 speech by he, the President of the European Commission on “The Dream has Died” and “The State of the... Read more... |
10 Questions for singer Live Foyn FriisTuesday, 18 September 2018
Norwegian-Danish singer Live Foyn Friis (for English-speaking readers, Live is her first name) has released six albums, and leads several different ensembles, scattered intriguingly across the divide between jazz and pop. Her voice is recognisably... Read more... |
CD: Moskus - MiraklerThursday, 16 August 2018
Last month, theartsdesk reviewed Skadedyr’s Musikk!, an eccentric album which skipped “through jazz, traditional music, atonal scrapings and wind instrument burblings.” Twelve Norwegian musicians were heard. Amongst them were Fredrik Luhr... Read more... |
CD: Skadedyr - Musikk!Wednesday, 25 July 2018
In spirit if not musical style, Musikk! shares chromosomes with late-Sixties ESP-label mavericks like Cro Magnon and Octopus, as well as The Residents of Meet the Residents, early This Heat and the Rock in Opposition collective. Sun Ra is in there... Read more... |
