World Tour #13 Norway | SunNeverSetsOnMusic

WORLD TOUR #13 NORWAY - MEDIA PLAYERS

World Tour #13 - Norway

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WORLD TOUR #13 NORWAY - ALBUMS

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Bendik Giske

BENDIK GISKE

Released 9 June 2023

Smalltown Supersound

****-

A body in motion, captured as sound. Every breath, every key-click part of an intimate choreography that collapses the gap between minimalism and ecstasy. This is not background music—it’s a confrontation with presence. Sensual, ascetic and quietly radical, the performance becomes its own ritual of self-invention.

Bendik Giske is a Berlin-based Norwegian saxophonist whose work collapses boundaries between performance art, club culture, and minimalism. Trained in jazz but liberated from genre constraints, he employs circular breathing and extended techniques to create immersive, unbroken waves of sound. Giske’s music is physical and political: it interrogates embodiment, queerness, and repetition, often exploring breath as both life force and musical gesture. Collaborating with producers and visual artists, he bridges the organic and the electronic, the sacred and the sensual. His live shows are spellbinding, often performed in a single exhalation—ritualistic, vulnerable, and deeply present.

On his third full-length album, Bendik Giske, the saxophonist turns inward. Produced by experimental polymath Beatrice Dillon, the record refines Giske’s sonic world into a more sculptural, sculpted form—sharper, colder, but no less emotive. Gone are the reverb-drenched excesses; in their place is a dry, tactile intimacy. Giske’s breath becomes the protagonist—sighing, circling, stretching across tracks in undulating arcs of phrasing that feel both somatic and synthetic.

Dillon's production emphasizes the percussive aspects of the saxophone—tongue slaps, breath pops, key clicks—blurring the line between body and machine. What results is not jazz, not techno, not ambient, but a hybrid language of motion and pulse. Tracks like “Rush” and “Not Yet” feel ritualistic, almost ceremonial, while “End” and “In Spite” twist breath and tone into spatial studies of tension and release. The album is lean, deliberate, and unrelenting—each sound earned.

Though abstract, the record is deeply personal. Giske’s exploration of repetition and physicality maps onto broader questions of identity and autonomy. It's a queering of form and function—discipline as desire, structure as surrender. Bendik Giske offers no clear resolution, only ecstatic cycles of becoming.

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Iris Silver Mist

JENNY HVAL

Released 2 May 2024

4AD

****-
A gossamer tapestry of whispered thoughts and glowing textures, this record invites you into a world. Lyrical and elusive, its strength lies in its restraint.

Jenny Hval is a singular voice in contemporary experimental music, known for her merging of art-pop, literature, and performance into meditative and radical sonic experiences. A former literature student and author, Hval’s works often explore gender, sexuality, mortality, and embodiment through a highly personal, poetic lens. Her music blends minimalist electronics, spoken word, and ambient textures into compositions that can feel both intimate and otherworldly. Across albums for Rune Grammofon, Sacred Bones, and 4AD, she has developed a reputation as a fearless and original artist whose work blurs the lines between music, essay, and dream.

Iris Silver Mist is Jenny Hval's ninth studio album, a contemplative exploration of transformation, memory and the impermanence of art and identity. Inspired by a fragrance of the same name by Serge Lutens, the album delves into the sensory experiences of scent and sound, drawing parallels between the two as mediums that evoke emotion and memory. Composed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the album reflects on the absence of live performances and the shifting nature of creative expression.

The 13-track album weaves ambient soundscapes with poetic lyrics, creating an atmosphere that is both intimate and otherworldly. Tracks like "To Be a Rose" and "All Night Long" blend experimental elements - jazzy brass, drum machines, ambient drones - with introspective lyrics that meditate on the essence of performance and the fluidity of identity. In "The Artist Is Absent," Hval captures the void left by the absence of live art, while "Huffing My Arm" blurs the line between physical presence and ghostly absence. Throughout the album, Hval's ethereal vocals and surreal imagery imbue ordinary objects with profound symbolism, inviting listeners to find beauty in fleeting, liminal moments.

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What Happened To The Heart?

AURORA

Released 3 April 2024

1000 HZ

****-

A journey through introspection and renewal. A blend of ethereal melodies and profound lyricism. A sonic exploration of the heart's capacity for healing and connection.

AURORA is a Norwegian singer-songwriter renowned for her ethereal vocals and fusion of indie pop, electronic, and folk influences. Emerging with her 2015 debut, she has consistently explored themes of nature, spirituality, and human emotion. Beyond her musical endeavors, AURORA is an advocate for environmental causes, often integrating activism into her art. Her performances are characterized by a blend of vulnerability and strength, captivating audiences worldwide. With each release, she delves deeper into introspection, challenging listeners to reflect on the world and their place within it.

What Happened to the Heart? is AURORA's fifth studio album, released on June 7, 2024. The album spans 16 tracks, weaving together indie pop, disco, techno, and folk elements to create a rich tapestry of sound. Inspired by a 2022 open letter from Indigenous climate activists titled "We Are The Earth," the album serves as a meditation on the loss of spiritual connection in modern life and a call to rekindle empathy and humanity.

The opening track, "Echo of My Shadow," sets a contemplative tone with its atmospheric production and introspective lyrics. "To Be Alright" introduces a danceable rhythm while probing the complexities of love and self-worth. Throughout the album, AURORA's signature falsetto guides listeners through themes of vulnerability, resilience, and hope. The closing track, "Invisible Wounds," offers a gentle conclusion, encapsulating the album's exploration of healing and self-discovery.

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La Comitiva

ERLAND ØYE & LA COMITIVA

Released 25 November 2024

Soundway Records

****-

Stories told in three languages, backed by breezy acoustic textures, this is music made for the joy of the moment - quiet, assured, and quietly radical in its calm.

Erlend Øye is a Norwegian musician renowned for his genre-hopping versatility and gentle tenor voice. Best known as one-half of indie folk duo Kings of Convenience and frontman of the electronic pop outfit The Whitest Boy Alive, Øye has spent the past decade immersed in Mediterranean life and sounds. Based in Sicily, he formed La Comitiva, a fluid collective of Italian and Latin musicians, to explore acoustic textures, subtle rhythms, and heartfelt lyricism in multiple languages. Blending bossa nova, cantautor-style balladry, and chamber pop with a relaxed, sun-drenched sensibility, Øye’s recent work radiates a global warmth that feels both personal and communal.

La Comitiva is the fruit of years of friendship, touring, and life lived between languages. Erlend Øye and his Sicilian collaborators take a low-key, conversational approach that favors atmosphere over precision. The songs, whether sung in English, Spanish, or Italian, glide gently along acoustic arrangements anchored by nylon-string guitar, piano, and subtle percussion.

Tracks like “Lockdown Blues” and “For the Time Being” reflect the album’s unhurried, introspective spirit. Øye's distinctive voice, soft and slightly melancholic, feels less like a performance and more like a confession shared across a kitchen table. Instrumentals such as “Abril’s Theme” and “Marco’s Theme” provide lyrical interludes, while “Paradiso” and “Altiplano” bring a light folkloric shimmer to the set.

There’s no standout single here - La Comitiva works as a continuous mood, a kind of sonic siesta. Yet it’s far from background music. Its warmth and intimacy invite close listening, revealing small gestures of love, memory, and resilience. Øye and his comrades don’t just sing about togetherness, they embody it.

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Are You There, Boy?

BEHARIE

Released 14 September 2023

Rancang Rencana Records

****-
Truly, Northern Soul: an album that navigates the tension between vulnerability and detachment with poetic elegance.

Beharie is the stage name of Christian Beharie, a gifted Norwegian singer-songwriter whose music elegantly bridges soul, R&B, and indie-pop. Drawing comparisons to artists like Frank Ocean and Leon Bridges, Beharie’s falsetto-rich vocals are vulnerable and intimate, often exploring themes of longing, identity, and emotional dislocation. His mixed-race heritage and queer identity give his work quiet political resonance, though his lyrics tend to the personal rather than polemical. With each release, he’s honed a soft-focus sound—lush yet restrained, spacious yet emotionally direct. Are You There, Boy? marks a confident step forward in scope and sonic maturity, earning him growing acclaim across Europe.

On Are You There, Boy?, expands Beharie's minimalist soul into a more cinematic realm. The album retains the intimate honesty of his earlier EPs but layers it with deeper textures—strings, synths, ambient swells—that give emotional weight to his stories of yearning and self-examination. His voice, a pliant and expressive falsetto, is the centerpiece throughout, exuding tenderness without ever tipping into sentimentality.

Songs like “We Never Knew” and “Heaven Sent” are featherlight but purposeful, revealing the ache in each lyric through hushed phrasing and careful production. There’s a noticeable step-up in sonic ambition too: “Deadly” features gentle choral backing and spectral beats, while the title track moves in slow-burning arcs, as if stretching to hold a question too big to resolve.

Even in its quietest moments, Are You There, Boy? feels emotionally precise and sonically rich, the work of an artist who knows exactly how to use space and softness to maximum effect. Beharie’s voice may be gentle, but it commands deep attention.

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Chimes At Midnight

MADRUGADA

Released 26 January 2022

Madrugada Music

Warner Music Norway

****-

Returning from a long silence, this band leans into shadow and stillness, emerging not with bombast but with songs that breathe. Stripped-down production and lived-in vocals replace myth with memory. It’s a record made not to impress but to endure — patient, weathered, and surprisingly tender in its depth.

Madrugada are one of Norway’s most iconic rock bands, originally formed in the mid-1990s and defined by their brooding sound, cinematic arrangements, and the unmistakable baritone of frontman Sivert Høyem. The band blended alt-rock, noir Americana, and European melancholy into a style both emotionally direct and atmospherically grand. After disbanding in 2008 following the tragic death of guitarist Robert Burås, Madrugada reunited a decade later to rapturous acclaim. Their music has always occupied a twilight space — spacious, romantic, and haunted — and they remain a touchstone for Norway’s darker, mood-driven rock tradition.

Chimes at Midnight, Madrugada’s first studio album in 14 years, is a triumphant return that honours the band’s signature atmosphere while sounding more emotionally unguarded and less stylised than before. Recorded in Los Angeles with a minimal, analogue approach, the album feels both intimate and windswept, like a letter written from exile.

Tracks such as “Nobody Loves You Like I Do” and “Dreams at Midnight” lean into the group’s flair for melancholic drama, but there’s more warmth and vulnerability here than on earlier records. Sivert Høyem’s voice is deeper and more worn — still powerful, but now more storyteller than siren. The production avoids posturing: arrangements are raw, guitars often clean, the rhythm section patient.

Ballads like “The World Could Be Falling Down” and “Empire Blues” draw from Americana and folk rock, but always filtered through the band’s Nordic duskiness. The album doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but instead refines it — proof that longevity and integrity can go hand in hand. Chimes at Midnight may be less immediately cinematic than Industrial Silence, but its emotional clarity and mature confidence make it deeply resonant.

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Released 28 October 2022

Smalltown Supersound

****-

These piano sketches and synth echoes aren’t songs, so much as flickers of feeling, as fragile and intimate as breath on glass. A deeply personal sonic diary that invites you to listen like you’re eavesdropping on time.

Anja Lauvdal is a genre-defying Norwegian pianist, composer, and sonic explorer known for her work in experimental jazz, ambient, and electronic improvisation. A key figure in Norway’s forward-thinking scene, she’s collaborated with bands like Moskus, Broen, Jenny Hval and Lasse Marhaug and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, but her solo ventures reveal a more introspective, textural side. Lauvdal’s artistry is defined by mood, process, and emotional nuance — often building pieces from intuitive improvisations and lo-fi sketches.

From A Story Now Lost is a fragmentary yet emotionally coherent album, made from recordings of Lauvdal improvising on upright pianos and cassette players over several years. The result is an evocative tapestry of warbling tape hiss, modest themes, and ambient decay, music more remembered than composed.

Tracks like “Tehanu” and “Fantasie for Agathe Backer Grøndahl” channel a personal Nordic lyricism, the former with halting grace and the latter paying homage to a pioneering Norwegian composer through fluttering tonal fragments. “Xerxesdrops” and “Xerxes Shore” offer lo-fi interludes, with slightly detuned piano loops suspended in foggy tape ambiance. “Darkkantate” feels almost ritualistic, like a hymn overheard through cracked speakers.

There’s a clear reverence here for physical sound sources: the clack of keys, the degradation of tape, the incidental resonance of room tone. Rather than polish these away, Lauvdal builds them into the structure, creating music that feels vulnerable and true.

More sculpted than improvised, yet resisting conventional development, the album is less a statement than a condition — soft, intimate, and hovering just at the edge of memory. Think early Hildur Guðnadóttir meets ambient Grouper, refracted through a Scandinavian lens of poetic understatement.

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Rokkur

MAJA RATJKE

Released 10 November 2003

Rune Grammofon

****-

In this eerie, slow-burning suite, time folds and melts. Strings shimmer like heat on black rock, electronics hover like mist, and a ghostly voice threads between worlds. This is music that doesn’t shout - it seeps, scorches, and lingers. Rokkur invites deep listening to the landscape of collapse and rebirth.

Maja S.K. Ratkje is a fearless Norwegian composer, performer, and sound artist whose work spans contemporary classical, noise, improvisation, and vocal experimentation. Equally at home in the concert hall or the underground scene, she’s a boundary-breaker known for her expressive use of electronics and extended vocal techniques. Her collaborators range from orchestras to noise duos, always meeting her intensity.

On Rokkur, she joins forces with Icelandic baroque/experimental ensemble Nordic Affect, creating a hybrid work that blurs tradition and technology, string quartet and spectral electronics.

The result is intimate yet eerie, rooted in Nordic ecology and myth, and profoundly of the present moment.

Rokkur - the Icelandic word for volcanic ash or “the aftercloud” - is a wordless meditation on disruption, resilience, and transfiguration. Composed by Maja S.K. Ratkje and performed by Nordic Affect, the album is structured as a five-part suite that fuses Baroque-era instrumentation (strings, harpsichord) with Ratkje’s atmospheric electronics and evocative vocal textures.

The album opens with faint creaks and breathy murmurs, before sliding into a series of suspended, nearly static tableaux. Over time, melodies fragment and reform like lava cooling into new terrain. Ratkje’s electronics are subtle but haunting - layered field recordings, granular synthesis, and looping echo that disturb and deepen the acoustic textures. The strings shimmer with restraint, sometimes bowed, sometimes plucked, always aware of the surrounding silence. Ratkje herself appears as an almost ghostly vocal presence, less a soloist than a spirit haunting the work.

Rokkur is a model of interdisciplinary composition: experimental, yet deeply listenable. It belongs in conversation with works by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir or Swedish composer Ellen Arkbro — artists who dissolve the lines between sound and landscape, tradition and disruption. Ratkje and Nordic Affect offer a musical experience that is as geological as it is emotional — slow, trembling, and ash-covered with beauty.

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Maternity Beat

HEDVIG MOLLESTAD

TRONDHEIM JAZZ ORCHESTRA

Released 18 November 2022

Rune Grammofon

****-

A visceral, orchestrated response to the seismic experience of motherhood, this suite bristles with both ferocity and tenderness. Few albums of this scale risk such emotional honesty - fewer still manage to make it sing.

Guitarist and composer Hedvig Mollestad has long blurred the lines between jazz, metal, and progressive rock, fronting her eponymous trio with visceral energy and experimental intent.

Maternity Beat is Mollestad’s most ambitious work to date: a bold suite for the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra reflecting her journey into motherhood. Rather than lead with virtuosity, she constructs immersive, cinematic environments that move between fragility and force. It’s a jazz symphony in mood and structure, foregrounding orchestration over solos.

The opening track, “On the Horizon Part 1,” sets the tone with a gentle layering of saxophones, flute, and spectral vocals, suggesting not a dramatic arrival but an inner reckoning — breath, expectancy, and spaciousness.

When the guitars emerge in “On the Horizon Part 2,” they serve the ensemble’s emotional momentum rather than dominate. Saxophones, brass, and strings are equal protagonists throughout, shaping the suite's evolving textures.

Tracks like “Do Re Mi Ma Ma” use childlike vocal motifs in a way that feels eerie rather than sentimental. “Her Own Shape” is all sombre beauty and low-end swell, while “Maternity Beat” and “All Flights Cancelled” showcase polyrhythmic punch and ensemble dynamics. Mollestad’s guitar threads through these pieces more as narrator than hero.

What’s striking is the work’s cohesion: no section feels ornamental. Every gesture belongs to a larger emotional and architectural arc.

Maternity Beat is a masterstroke of jazz composition — personal, visceral, and totally commanding.

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Tempest Revisited

HEDVIG MOLLESTAD

Released 19 November 2021

Rune Grammofon

****-

This suite of instrumentals breathes like weather and broods like myth. Equal parts jazz, prog, and orchestral Mollestad conjures wind, light, and looming tides with poetic precision.

Hedvig Mollestad is a celebrated Norwegian guitarist, composer, and bandleader known for fusing jazz, prog-rock, and avant-garde metal into a fiercely distinctive sound. With her trio and other configurations, she has released a string of acclaimed albums on Rune Grammofon, marked by their dense arrangements, muscular riffs, and improvisational freedom. While her earlier work leaned into raw power, her more recent output — including large-ensemble compositions — has embraced cinematic breadth and harmonic complexity.

Tempest Revisited reflects this evolution: inspired by Arne Nordheim’s 1998 The Tempest, Mollestad crafts a suite that bridges climate anxiety, classical gravitas, and electric propulsion.
Tempest Revisited is Hedvig Mollestad’s most ambitious and refined work to date — a through-composed suite for a jazz-rock ensemble with classical leanings, originally commissioned to mark the opening of the new Munch Museum in Oslo. The album doesn’t just echo Shakespeare’s tempest or Nordheim’s homage; it responds to the storm of our present — ecological, emotional, existential.

From the opening shimmer of “Sun on a Dark Sky,” there’s a striking restraint. Mollestad’s signature guitar is present, but woven into a broader tapestry of flute, saxophone, Moog, and lush rhythm textures. The dynamic arcs are carefully plotted — building tension, swirling in turbulence, then releasing into haunting calm.

“Winds Approaching” and “418 (Stairs in Storms)” exhibit her gift for cinematic pacing, while “High Hair” and “Heron” lean into melodic counterpoint and moody lyricism. The album closes in stillness — less a resolution, more a pause for breath.

Balancing the physicality of rock with the spatial sensibility of Nordic jazz and the formal ambition of contemporary composition, Tempest Revisited affirms Mollestad as a singular voice in European music. Cerebral, emotional and utterly immersive, it’s a storm worth surrendering to.

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Subaqueous Silence

AYUMI TANAKA TRIO

Released 29 October 2021

ECM

*****

With barely-there gestures and a reverence for the unsaid, Tanaka's trio charts emotional territory between memory and mist: a language of pauses, held breaths, and fleeting impressions. The deeper you listen, the more you hear beneath the surface.

Ayumi Tanaka is a Japanese-born, Norway-based pianist and composer known for her introspective touch and deft ability to blur the lines between composed and improvised music. Her trio — featuring Christian Meaas Svendsen on double bass and Per Oddvar Johansen on drums — is one of the most subtle and distinct ensembles in Nordic jazz. Rather than building momentum through dynamic flourishes, Tanaka sculpts silence and resonance into the music’s fabric, drawing from both her classical Japanese heritage and the cool minimalism of European jazz. The result is haunting, slow-release improvisation with a striking sense of stillness and space.
The album is a masterclass in restrained expression, offering a kind of quietude rarely found in jazz. Not so much meditative as emotionally porous, each note or gesture is placed as if with breath-held deliberation. Tanaka’s playing often feels more like calligraphy than jazz piano — motifs teased gently from silence, then allowed to dissolve again, unforced.

The album’s pacing is glacial but not cold. In “Ruins,” one senses melodic memory being excavated from beneath layers of quiet; in “Black Rain,” brushed percussion and softly bowed bass strings create a sense of spectral unease. There are melodies, but they resist easy resolution. Johansen and Svendsen are not accompanists but co-weavers of sonic space, understanding when to contribute and — more importantly — when to hold back.

This is not jazz for the impatient or for background listening. It’s music that holds a mirror up to your own sense of time and attention. Like its title suggests, Subaqueous Silence invites you to submerge, to hear things dulled and magnified in equal measure — to swim in sound and silence as if they were one.

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Sounds & Sequences

DANIEL SOMMER, ARVE HENRIKSEN, JOHANNES LUNDBERG

Released 25 October 2024

April Records

****-

Three master improvisers sketch in breath, resonance, and absence, producing an album to inhabit as much as to hear.

Daniel Sommer is a Danish drummer and composer whose recent work explores the contemplative edge of Nordic jazz. Known for his nuanced touch and sensitivity to space, Sommer’s projects often balance composition and improvisation with poetic restraint.

Sounds & Sequences is part two of his Nordic Trilogy and features Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen, celebrated for his breathy, shakuhachi-like tone and ethereal electronics and Swedish bassist Johannes Lundberg, an ECM-adjacent player fluent in spectral textures and arco lyricism.

Together, the trio crafts immersive, slow-blooming soundscapes that defy genre, drawing on ambient, improvised, and contemporary classical influences in pursuit of mood and atmosphere over melodic narrative.

Sounds & Sequences is an album of patience and poise, where sound functions less as a carrier of tunes and more as the residue of collective listening. Over eleven pieces, the trio never rushes, letting quietness and breath take precedence. Sommer’s percussion rarely asserts—it rustles, hisses, or gently taps, functioning more as ambient detail than rhythmic propulsion. Lundberg’s bass often stretches long tones or anchors passages with rich arco resonance. Henriksen remains the main melodic presence, but even he drifts like weather: part trumpet, part voice, part vapor.

On tracks like “Skyggespil” and “Ego Ekko,” electronics blur acoustic sources into abstraction. “Powerglass” hints at something like form, but even here, conventional structure dissolves into open texture. The recording quality is intimate—you hear room tone, soft creaks, breath. These are not flaws, but part of the music’s living frame. The title track, “Sounds and Sequences,” is quietly revelatory, distilling the trio’s logic into patient ebb and flow.

This isn’t jazz as we typically define it, but a kind of shared sonic meditation.

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Hardcore Romance

ARVE HENRIKSEN, TRYGVE SEIM

ANDERS JORMIN, MARKKU OUNASKARI

Released 2 May 2025

ECM

****-

A masterclass in restraint, where silence is sacred and every sound carries the weight of intention.

Arve Henriksen (trumpet) and Trygve Seim (saxophones) are two of Norway’s most sonically adventurous jazz musicians, known for their deeply lyrical phrasing and sculptural use of breath and silence.

For this recording they were joined by Swedish bassist Anders Jormin - a longtime ECM stalwart, revered for his poetic harmonic sensibility and improvisational openness and Finnish drummer Markku Ounaskari who brings quiet authority and painterly texture to every collaboration. Together, they create an acoustic sound world suspended between jazz, Nordic folk, and sacred music, emphasizing listening over leading, evocation over statement. This is chamber jazz of the highest order — sparse, reverent, and deeply immersive.

Arcanum unfolds as a suite of sonic meditations, where each track offers a distinct yet cohesive exploration of mood and texture. The album opens with “Nokitpyrt,” a composition by Seim, setting a contemplative tone with its sparse melodic lines. “Armon Lapset,” a Finnish traditional piece, is rendered with reverence, highlighting the quartet's ability to infuse folk material with jazz sensibilities. “Folkesong” and “Trofast” continue this thread, weaving lyrical improvisations that blur the lines between composition and spontaneity.

“Lost in Vanløse” and “Old Dreams” showcase the ensemble's dynamic range, moving from introspective passages to more animated interplay. “Polvere Uno” and “Pharao” delve into more abstract territories, with Henriksen's trumpet and Seim's saxophones engaging in free-form dialogues over Jormin's anchoring bass and Ounaskari's textured percussion. The inclusion of Ornette Coleman's “What Reason Could I Give” pays homage to free jazz traditions, interpreted here with a Nordic sensibility that emphasizes space and nuance.

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When We Leave

MATHIAS EICK

Released 24 September 2021

ECM

****-

A musical postcard from the edge of memory, that speaks to distance, departure, and the quiet ache of return, where melancholy and gratitude walk hand in hand.

Mathias Eick is a Norwegian trumpeter and composer whose ECM recordings are hallmarked by their lyrical restraint, cinematic atmosphere, and genre-fluid instrumentation. A multi-instrumentalist by training, Eick’s music draws on jazz, classical, folk, and post-rock, often unfolding as contemplative tone poems rather than improvisational showcases. His sound is deeply melodic, informed as much by Nordic melancholy as by the grandeur of open landscapes. Regularly collaborating with a tight circle of Scandinavian players, Eick favours ensemble interplay and emotional clarity over technical flash. When We Leave (2021) continues his exploration of memory, movement, and homecoming in a suite of finely crafted pieces.

When We Leave is the most cohesive and emotionally resonant work in Eick’s discography to date. The compositions unfold like chapters in an autobiographical novel, each balancing introspection with cinematic sweep. His signature trumpet tone — rounded, clear, and vocal-like — leads the ensemble without dominating it, often blending into the band as an equal voice rather than a soloist’s spotlight.

The rhythm section, led by the supple drumming of Torstein Lofthus and the anchoring double bass of Audun Erlien, moves with a quiet intensity. Andreas Ulvo’s piano and keyboard textures shimmer subtly, while the violin of Håkon Aase brings a new chamber-folk colour to the group, deepening the emotional palette. Tracks like “Loving” and “Flying” ebb and flow with grace, suggesting both geographical and emotional departures, while “Arvo” nods gently to sacred minimalism.This is music of yearning — quiet, expressive, and richly melodic — with every note placed as if remembering something just out of reach. ECM’s pristine production frames the ensemble beautifully, allowing the music’s warmth and stillness to resonate fully. When We Leave feels like a return to oneself — a homecoming that understands the cost of the journey.

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Helsinki Songs

TRYGVE SEIM

Released 31 August 2018

ECM

****-

A quietly radiant suite of lyrical chamber jazz that balances melancholy and hope with melodic restraint and delicate ensemble interplay: a Nordic song cycle of uncommon emotional clarity.

Trygve Seim is a Norwegian saxophonist and composer celebrated for his deeply lyrical playing and refined sense of atmosphere. A long-time ECM artist, Seim’s music sits at the crossroads of jazz, European chamber music, and global folk traditions — especially Armenian and Middle Eastern modalities. His tone, especially on soprano saxophone, is breathy and emotive, marked by restraint rather than display. He’s collaborated widely, from ECM ensembles to theatre and classical settings, but Helsinki Songs (2018) sees him return to the quartet format with pianist Kristjan Randalu, bassist Mats Eilertsen, and drummer Markku Ounaskari — each an intuitive player attuned to subtle, collective expression.

Helsinki Songs is a quietly luminous recording that distills Trygve Seim’s compositional voice into an elegant set of reflective miniatures. The opener “Sol’s Song” is featherlight but rooted, unfolding like a lullaby in slow motion. The title track “Helsinki Song” stretches over nearly eight minutes of lyrical phrases and gentle rhythmic murmurs, its melodic material turning inward like a poem reread aloud.

“New Beginning” and “Ciaccona per Embrik” both display Seim’s gift for melodic simplicity — the former hopeful and spacious, the latter nodding subtly to Baroque form. “Birthday Song (for Mats Eilertsen)” is intimate and personal, a restrained tribute that highlights the bassist’s central role in the ensemble’s emotional pacing. “Sorrow March” brings darker hues with its slow, deliberate tread and dusky harmonies.

On “Randalusian Folk Song,” Kristjan Randalu’s pianism comes to the fore, blending Iberian color with Nordic clarity, while Seim’s soprano melody floats freely above. “Morning Song (dedicated to Jimmy Webb)” shows Seim’s love of American songcraft, reframed through his ambient, chamber-jazz lens. Even at its most abstract, the quartet moves as one — never hurried, always in service of the mood.

This is music of grace and generosity, gently drawn and patiently shared.

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Our Time

TRYGVE SEIM, FRODE HALTLI

Released 13 September 2024

ECM

****-
A meditative, borderless dialogue between saxophone and accordion that drifts between improvisation and tradition.

Norwegian saxophonist Trygve Seim and accordionist Frode Haltli have long navigated the space between composed and improvised music, drawing from European classical, Middle Eastern, and Nordic folk traditions. Seim’s soprano and tenor saxophone work is breathy, lyrical, and emotionally poised; Haltli’s accordion playing is expansive, capable of delicate melodic shading and orchestral breadth. On Our Time (2021), the duo crafts a dialogue built on silence, slowness, and close listening. While both are ECM veterans, this recording feels especially intimate — neither jazz nor classical, but a meditative hybrid informed by improvisation, folk memory, and subtle recontextualizations of global source material.
Our Time is a sparse, deeply considered meditation on memory and breath. The album opens with “Du, mi tid,” a Haltli original that feels suspended in time — a minimalist folk hymn shaped by air and resonance. Seim’s saxophone lines hover, nearly whispering, while Haltli lets his bellows breathe slowly, drawing emotion from silence.

Structured improvisations form the core of the album, with each “Improvisation” suite pairing spontaneous duo explorations with evocative cultural references. “Improvisation No. 1 / Fanfare” and its reprise later in the album are shaped around quiet motifs, not bluster. “Arabian Tango” is one of the few composed Seim pieces, blending modal lyricism with a gently sinuous groove.

The traditional Ukrainian lullaby “Oy Khodyt’ Son, Kolo Vikon” is haunting in its unadorned delivery, contrasting the spiraling depth of “Improvisation No. 2 / Shyama Sundara Madana Mohana,” where a devotional Indian melody gradually emerges.Stravinsky’s “Les Cinq Doigts No. 5” is briefly quoted in “Improvisation No. 4,” suggesting that even modernist fragments can be reframed as song.

The album closes with “Elegi,” a poignant Seim original — part lament, part farewell — summing up this duo’s refined aesthetic: neither jazz nor chamber music, but a quiet ritual for two breath-powered instruments.

Read more ... ECM

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Movements of Air

DANIEL HERSKEDAL, EYOLF DALE

HELGE ANDREAS NORBAKKEN

Released 28 February 2025

Resilen Records

****-

A sound world where every note and silence is imbued with purpose.

Norwegian tuba virtuoso Daniel Herskedal continues to redefine the expressive boundaries of his instrument on Movements of Air, his tenth release with Edition Records. Collaborating once again with pianist Eyolf Dale and percussionist Helge Andreas Norbakken, Herskedal crafts a suite that is both introspective and expansive, weaving elements of jazz, classical, and ambient music into a cohesive whole.

The album opens with "The Olive Branch," setting a tone of gentle contemplation. Dale's crystalline piano lines and Norbakken's subtle percussive textures provide a delicate framework for Herskedal's melodic tuba, which often resembles a baritone voice in its warmth and depth.

Tracks like "Peace River Crossing" and "We Belong To Each Other" showcase the trio's ability to create emotionally resonant soundscapes, while "Mountain of Companions" introduces a more dynamic interplay, with rhythmic motifs that suggest a journey through rugged terrains. "Elements of Harmony" and "Harmonic Allusions" highlight Herskedal's innovative approach to harmony and texture, blending traditional tonality with modern sensibilities.
The album's thematic focus on hope and the pursuit of a better future is evident throughout, particularly in compositions like "The White Flag" and "Change," which balance serenity with a sense of forward momentum. "Civilian Casualties" and "Who Are You?" delve into more somber territories, prompting reflection on conflict and identity.

Read more ... Bandcamp

Many

CHRISTIAN WALLUMRØD ENSEMBLE

Released 28 February 2020

HUBRO / Grappa Musikkforlag

****-

Unfolding with an uncanny sense of patience, resisting climax, resisting category, each silence is as meaningful as each sound, and the ensemble plays like a single organism.

Christian Wallumrød is a Norwegian pianist and composer whose ensemble work fuses chamber music, experimental jazz, and Nordic folk minimalism. A veteran of ECM and a key figure in the Scandinavian avant-garde, he favors quietude, texture, and spatial awareness over jazz orthodoxy.

Many, developed over four years, is a masterclass in reduction and refinement, shaped as much by silence and resonance as by melody.

The album expands the group’s sonic palette through the subtle integration of electronics by all members, adding ambient grain and unpredictable textures. These shifts lead to disjunctive, stop-start rhythms and staccato phrases that feel sculpted from silence. Melodic ideas emerge tentatively, often after long abstraction, but when they arrive, they carry emotional heft—Wallumrød’s piano sometimes delivering mere seconds of beauty that feel monumental.

Featuring the same quintet as 2016’s Kurzsam & Fulger, Many distills the ensemble’s aesthetic while simultaneously departing from it. There are hints of swing and proto-balladry, but refracted through the group’s ritualistic, post-classical lens. Electronics, musique concrète gestures, and acoustic manipulations blur the boundaries between composed and improvised sound. Many sounds like the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble—only more so: concentrated, elusive, and quietly profound.

Read more ... Bandcamp

Slutte Og Byne

VALKYRIEN ALLSTARS

Released 16 October 2020

Grappa Musikkforlag

****-
Rebooting tradition with synths, sorrow, and soul-searching on slutte og byne.

Valkyrien Allstars, founded in Oslo in 2003, are one of Norway’s most inventive folk-rooted bands. Initially built around traditional Hardanger fiddle music, they’ve evolved into an experimental ensemble fusing folk, rock, synth-pop, and free-form improvisation. Fronted by the raw and magnetic Tuva Syvertsen, their music straddles tradition and innovation with fearless intimacy.

On slutte og byne (“stop and begin”), Valkyrien Allstars craft a heady, melancholic meditation on liminality—between relationships, routines, identities, and eras. The album plays like a road trip through emotional hinterlands, spiked with vulnerability and defiance. Syvertsen’s unpolished vocal style—part chant, part confession—anchors the album in earthy reality, even as the band leans into dreamier soundscapes.

Opening with “i drømmene mine,” a spoken fragment like a diary’s torn page, the album drifts into the bruised pulse of “ikke no å spare på,” where synths buzz against stark percussion. “alt går an å la vær” sprawls over six minutes, building tension with ghostly harmonies and ambient churn. Elsewhere, “dritings i en bil” is part tongue-in-cheek, part genuine lament—a standout track mixing slurred vocals with tight electronic grooves. The title track, “slutte og byne,” is as close to a thesis statement as the album offers: contemplative, elliptical, emotionally scorched.

Valkyrien are no longer a folk band by any strict measure. Here, the Hardingfele is more mood than melody, and the band’s sonic palette leans art-pop and post-rock. But the spirit of folk—the sense of communal unease and catharsis—remains. This is brave, genre-averse music with scars on its sleeves.

Read more ... Bandcamp

The Triumph

MEGALODON COLLECTIVE

Released 10 January 2025

Package Records

****-
An album that growls, stabs, and explodes - jazz made for the end times.

Megalodon Collective is a ferocious Norwegian septet born from the Trondheim jazz scene. Merging free jazz, noise rock, and punk aggression, the group thrives on collective composition and elastic dynamics. Their sound is chaotic yet deliberate, favoring massed brass attacks, rhythmic instability, and a thrilling disregard for jazz orthodoxy.

"The Triumph" is 55 minutes of fearless musical invention that defies categorization as its predecessor, "Animals", did before it: but this time with laser-precision, slicing and dicing and splicing genres and generic tropes with both joyous abandon and hyper-focussed intent.

What seems like a post-rock quasi-ambient undulation can soon become a tsunami of ensemble jazz angularity; off-kilter bossa nova metamorphoses into north African dream jams; frantic urban big band riffs break down into math rock staccato rhythms and reassemble and explode at seemingly random intervals (but there's nothing random about any of it – they know what they're doing, when to do it, and why they should); moments of pastoral reverie extend while maintaining a supressed tension as though they might erupt into chaos at any moment; chaotic free jazz jamming breaks out of its vortex into ultra-structured melodic unisons.

Where some bands are like a collection of single cell organisms, each performing their part, Megalodon Collective is a multicellular single organism with the ability to turn and twist mid-flow in ways few can manage outside the realm of MIDI programming. Thematically, the album is a veritable 21st century melange of notions: global warming sits alongside glory and doom, while both treasure and flotsam and jetsam can be found in depths both tumultuous and placid. It is a collection of micro-symphonies for septet, produced by a collective singular voice.

Read more ... ECM

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Gákti

VASSVIK

Released 31 May 2019

Hello / Grappa Musikkforlag

****-

Avant-yoik meets elemental soundcraft from Norway’s Arctic north.

Torgeir Vassvik is a coastal Sámi singer, joiker (singer of the traditional Nordic folk music), and sound artist from Gamvik, Northern Norway, who creates immersive sonic rituals that connect ancestral voice with contemporary sound. His 2011 album Gákti is named after traditional Sámi clothing. It fuses guttural joik, Tuvan throat singing, and natural field recordings with minimalistic instrumentation, including electric guitar, throat harp, and subtle percussion.

Rather than a hybrid or collage, this is a deep integration of tradition and experimentation. Each track hums with a raw, earthy spirit, invoking animals, weather, memory, and landscape.

Vassvik’s voice takes center stage: sometimes intimate and whispering, sometimes expansive and howling into the void.

Gákti evokes a spiritual continuity between ancient rites and modern sound art—contemplative, eerie, and deeply rooted in place. It’s neither nostalgic nor folkloric—it’s living music, made in dialogue with the elements.

Read more ... Bandcamp

Side Quest Living

IVAN AVE

Released 26 February 2025

SQL Records / DUR / Playground

****-

A smooth, soulful detour that turns side quests into primary courses.

Ivan Ave is a Norwegian rapper, singer, and producer known for his introspective lyrics and genre-hopping beats that blend soul, jazz, hip-hop, and R&B. With roots in both Oslo's indie scene and the global beatmaking underground, he has worked with producers like Mndsgn and Kiefer, carving a niche as a thoughtful storyteller with a mellow, melodic flow and a crate-digger’s ear for vintage sounds.

Side Quest Living feels like a mature pivot, threading lo-fi soul, soft funk, and bedroom pop in a self-aware chronicle of modern adulthood. The album moves with the intimacy of a handwritten letter, brimming with mid-tempo grooves, analog synth textures, and diary-style lyricism.

Ave’s delivery - never urgent, always assertive, but also reflective - suggests someone content to live outside the main narrative arc. There are nods to Sade, Thundercat, and even Prefab Sprout in the quietly lush arrangements. Whether he's riffing on late capitalism's absurdities, nostalgic VHS dreams, or the odd tenderness of IKEA afternoons, Ave’s wit and vulnerability shine. While less overtly hip-hop than past work, this album deepens his artistry, offering something warm, lightly psychedelic, and deeply personal.

Read more ... Bandcamp

Ode To Stone

INGRI HØYLAND

Released 24 November 2023

Rhizome

****-

Stone sings back in whispers and tremors.

Ingrid Høyland is a Norwegian sound artist, composer, and performer whose practice sits at the confluence of field recording, sculpture, and extended vocal technique. Her work often explores the materiality of sound—how it resonates through space and substance—with a particular interest in geological time, bodily memory, and feminist ecological listening.

Ode To Stone is an arresting, slow-burning meditation on the elemental. Built from voice, found sound, and electronic interventions, the album listens more like an installation than a sequence of tracks—inviting deep attention to texture, resonance, and decay. Høyland treats stone not only as metaphor, but as collaborator: recordings of rock surfaces, grinding and shifting, are folded into guttural vocal expressions and sparse electronics, creating a sonic world both ancient and bodily. The result is stark and sensual, often eerie—hovering between ritual chant and environmental abstraction. At times reminiscent of Áine O’Dwyer or Félicia Atkinson, yet unmistakably rooted in a Nordic minimalism, this is not easy listening, but profoundly rewarding for those attuned to slowness and strangeness. Høyland invites us to hear the Earth breathe, groan, and remember.

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