Medtner: Arabesques, Dithyrambs, Elegies and other short piano works Hamish Milne (Hyperion)The title is already intriguing; enough to send you running to the dictionary to find out what a dithyramb is. Nikolai Medtner’s three examples are fun to listen to, the second finishing with a flamboyant coda. Born in Moscow in 1880, poor Medtner eventually pitched up in a Golders Green semi, dying there in 1951. He had his champions – Rachmaninov respected him highly, and Horowitz believed that he was “a wonderful composer”. His music is lyrical, highly melodic and beautifully constructed. Read more ...

Despite being called Roger Brown, the protagonist of Morten Tyldum's wickedly stylish and knowing thriller (adapted from Jo Nesbø's bestseller) is Norwegian, and earns himself a comfortable living as a corporate headhunter. Prowling the coolly minimalist boardrooms and restaurants of a seemingly recession-proof Scandinavia, Brown (Aksel Hennie) tracks his fat-cat candidates with smarmy knowingness, congratulating himself on his mastery of his own private game.Yet for all his oily skills, Roger is also living way beyond his means, and has developed a lucrative sideline as an art thief to boost Read more ...

Norway’s bouncy electropoppers Casiokids release their new single “Kaskaden” next week. They’ve chosen to premier the video on theartsdesk. Directed by their long-term collaborator Blank Blank, the fantasia takes in Kung Fu films and the Hollywood of the Eighties, mixing them with a Norwegian flavour.The video for “Kaskaden”, a track from their recent Aabenbaringen over aaskammen album, is produced and directed for Casiokids by the Finnish/Colombian/Norwegian collective Blank Blank and choreographed by the Dutch contemporary dancer Marjolein Vogels. The band describe the video as a “ a film- Read more ...

Although the four days of Norway’s 15th by:Larm Festival were dominated by the presentation of the second annual Nordic Music Prize, there were plenty of other distractions: a sobering tour of Norwegian black metal’s infamous sites, a talk by legendary Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, what felt like millions of shows in millions of venues, and weather confounding all expectations of what Oslo ought to be like in February.Previous visits to by:Larm have involved negotiating snow three-foot deep, urban pack ice and temperatures of minus 18 centigrade. This year, the sun shone, temperatures hovered Read more ...

It’s about the bass and the drums. The choirboy high vocals and sugary melodies catch the ear first, but they’d be so much soufflé without the room-shaking, stomach-wobbling bass throb, the Chic-style disco drumming and its tsk-tsk-tsk hi-hat shuffle. Combined, the soft and airy, the propulsive and grounded make the audience move. Not tap a toe, but actually move – dance.Casiokids need that connection as, despite every other person at this sold-out show being Norwegian, there’s the language barrier. A rarity amongst Norwegian musical exports, Casiokids sing in their native language. There was Read more ...

Bergen’s going to be pretty cold in January, but Aabenbaringen over aaskammen by the Norwegian city’s Casiokids will thaw the most frozen of feet. Their twinkly, occasionally Afro-assisted, sometimes New Order-ish electropop brings a smile too.Casiokids have been on the radar for half a decade, but Aabenbaringen over aaskammen is only their second album proper, following 2006’s Fück midi. Since then, there’s been a smattering of singles and 2010’s compilation/remix album Topp stemning på lokal bar. Aabenbaringen over aaskammen's 11 tracks include a remake of “London Zoo”, first heard on a Read more ...

The surprises linger longest. The things you’re not prepared for, the things of which you’ve got little foreknowledge. Lykke Li’s Wounded Rhymes was amazing, and she was equally astonishing live, too. Fleet Foxes's Helplessness Blues was more than a consolidation on their debut and The War On Drugs’s Slave Ambient was a masterpiece. But you already knew to keep an eye on these three. Things arriving by stealth had the greatest impact.This year, music again proved it has the power to surprise. Terrific albums from unknown quantities (of varying degrees) like Rayographs, Huntsville (from Norway Read more ...

John Carpenter's original The Thing from 1982 had punch, pace, shocks, horror, dramatic tension and Kurt Russell in the lead. It also had a great intro, with its scenes of an apparently blameless and photogenic husky being pursued across Antarctica by gunmen in a helicopter. How we cheered when the animal was saved. How we shouldn't have.It's indicative of the low calibre of this so-called "prequel" that Carpenter's opening now becomes a belated, tacked on ending, stopping (with slavish literal-mindedness) a few frames short of where Carpenter's film began. We learned in the previous movie Read more ...

She grew up in Norway, lives in Sweden and has been recording since 2003. Her new album, It All Starts with One, is her most assured, her most vital. But Ane Brun’s recent work with Peter Gabriel has attracted attention outside Scandinavia. Her vocal contribution to his remake of “Don’t Give Up” claimed it as her own. Last night erased Gabriel from her CV. This fabulous show was a new beginning.Starting with a quartet of songs drawn from It All Starts with One (“These Days”, “One”, “Worship” and “Words”) instantly stated that this concert was about moving forwards. And opening with the Read more ...

Fusion is a pretty difficult word to deal with. Miles Davis's Bitches Brew might have inspired a raft of jazzers to embrace rock, but an awful lot of the crossover that followed – like prog rock – became the musical equivalent of the love that dare not speak its name. Shoot!, the debut album from Norway’s Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen, might fit that bill, but it’s not that straightforward.A formally educated guitarist, she was the 2009 Molde International Jazz Festival’s Jazz Talent of the Year. Her work with The Trondheim Jazzorkester and her own Trio Thomassen (whose repertoire includes the Read more ...

Oslo, August 31st and The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) share more than a release date. One is a melancholic existential meditation and the other ostensibly a horror film, but both openly draw from earlier films, focus on an outsider unable to connect with society and use capital cities as background noise rather than window dressing. One is wilfully unpleasant.But first, Oslo, August 31st, an elegiac reflection on coming to the end of the line. It reconfigures Louis Malle’s 1963 film The Fire Within (Le feu follet), itself based on La Rochelle’s novel. In the book and the earlier Read more ...

Iceland is remote. Strategic too. Vikings stopped off there on the way to North America. It hosted the Reagan-Gorbachev summit 25 years ago. On the anniversary, visitors from America, Canada and across continental Europe are in Reykjavík for the 13th annual Iceland Airwaves. Over its five days the festival brings an extraordinary range of music to Iceland’s capital. Three years on from the country’s financial meltdown, Iceland remains strategic. Culturally strategic.Reykjavík, though, is small. Walking from the dockside to the fringes of the built-up area takes 20 minutes. The city's streets Read more ...