Norway
Kieron Tyler
To Whom Buys a Record roams through 12 crisply recorded pieces confirming that jazz which isn’t shy of acknowledging its heritage can still have an edge. Though structured and tight, each composition is defined by an attack positing this as an unmediated music: not so much improvisation, but still free-flowing.Take “Bøtteknott”. A sax takes off; stabbing, then weaving. The drums are relentless. A double bass dives, runs and skips. During the more subdued “Broken Beauty”, a mournful sax refrain gives way to a tense wash of cymbal and then, on its own, pulses of bass. A storm is coming.The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The timing seemed odd. Sigrid is internationally successful. She’s Norway’s highest-profile musical ambassador since a-ha. Yet instead of headlining at 2019’s Øya Festival, she hits the stage at 6.45. Has she been demoted in favour of Tame Impala, who are given the final slot at 9.30?Then, as the crowd begins gathering in the natural amphitheatre before the Amfiet stage in the Tøyen park in Norway’s capital, it becomes clear. The timing recognises that some of her younger fans might not usually be up at 10 or later. Sigrid’s fan base is multi-generational, with her youngest admirers around Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“All this evil and dark crap was supposed to be fun,” complains exasperated Norwegian black metal overlord Euronymous, played by Rory Culkin, as his world spirals out of control in a cataclysm of murder, suicide and church burnings. The true events that inspired Lords of Chaos are some of the most bizarre and twisted in the history of popular music. Fun they are not. Freakish, depressing and horrific, certainly. Strangely, however, the film is, upon occasion, very funny.Director Jonas Åkerlund is primarily renowned as the man behind ground-breaking pop videos (notably for Madonna, Lady Gaga Read more ...
David Nice
You should not die or be born on Svalbard, 1,985 kilometres above Norway's northernmost coast, and at 18 you work or leave for the mainland. Hunting is over, mining nearly so. Tourism, carefully managed, and Arctic research are the future; the Global Seed Vault is also here, and Syria has been the first country to take from it. Excursions outside the biggest settlement, Longyearbyen, are advisable only with an armed guard; dangerous polar bears outnumber inhabitants and occasionally crash into town. A special Svalbardian variety of reindeer and arctic foxes seem comfortable ambling around Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Ole Bull sounds like some legendary gun-slinging hero of the Wild West. A legend he definitely was, and he spent long enough in the US to found a migrant community in Pennsylvania. But the Norwegian virtuoso (1810-1880) made his name not with a rifle but a fiddle. Back in Bergen, his birthplace, Norway’s first global superstar bought an entire island, Lysøen. He commissioned a fantasy mansion there from the architect Conrad von der Lippe. A Moorish dream in blue-grey pine, the Lysøen house makes an absurdly picturesque venue – one of several scattered in and around the coastal city – for the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Do You Believe in Heather? Chamber music by Ståle Kleiberg (2L)Ståle Kleiberg's String Quartet No 3 is a masterpiece, I think. Small but perfectly formed, it's unassumingly brilliant. Kleiberg’s use of “extended tonality” is fascinating: listen to this quartet blind and you'd have a hard time placing it chronologically. Structurally impressive and melodically rich, it grips like a benign vice. Especially in the closing seconds, a physically exhilarating tie-up of loose ends which culminates in a deliciously unexpected final chord. Honestly, it's seriously, seriously good, and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The past haunts the present and looks likely to torpedo the future in Rosmersholm, the lesser-known Ibsen play now receiving a major West End revival in welcome defiance of the commercial odds. The protean Sonia Friedman, this venture's producer, was wise to grant the directing reins to Ian Rickson, who has made many a Pinter play land in a similar environment (and directed the National's glorious Translations last year). Blessed with the design team of one's dreams and an ace trio of leads, Ibsen's sometimes-murky psychology here rivets throughout, even Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
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 flowers. In their shapes and shades, all play their harmonious part in this beautiful, neutral world of elements and creatures and objects which (as Karl Ove Knausgaard puts it) “doesn’t care about us, which doesn’t care about anything, which merely exists”. And that indifference of the universe makes you want, not to scream, but to smile.Painted Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
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 of the summer, propelling its young Norwegian protagonist to the heady heights of Glastonbury and the BBC Sound of 2018 title making its inclusion, along with fellow 2017 track “Strangers”, on her first full-length appear a little cheeky. Consider them the advance guard - or perhaps a Trojan horse - for a collection of bittersweet bangers with just Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
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 rosy picture. The narrator of the title track, which opens the album, lives next door to the garden, climbs its fence and describes what’s encountered within: a devil offers money in exchange for a good time and ecstasy is achievable only by following the Goddess of Darkness.Norway’s Susanna Wallumrød is not the first musician to co-opt the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
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 delirium, she pledged herself; on the other, there is her devoted and rational doctor husband Wangel (Adrian Rawlins). The consequences of neither option are clear, for while Ellida has lived through both periods, she has hardly been alive in either. Instead, the heroine of Ibsen's 1888 drama is numbed, adrift, and it is only now – under Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
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. Riffs form the basis of their instrumentals, with improvisation following on from that though within rigidly structured formats. A composition's main melodic themes and rhythms are never far away. Theirs is not a music of aimless, flaccid noodling or of playing so mired in technical proficiency that it requires multiple degrees in musicology to grasp Read more ...