The conversational, or tabloid, or trivial version of the story is this: Susanne Sundfør is cool, and weird, and crucially a contrarian, the kind of contrarian who will invite fans to two intimate churches – and watch those fans scurry over from their remote outposts across the world, since she no longer plays outside Norway – and then spend the entire gig performing behind them; they in pews facing the altar, and she standing in the organ loft, emoting to their backs.
The longer and more honest version is that the Norwegian singer-songwriter is a restless and questing thinker – her Instagram stories an unstinting succession of photographs of paragraphs from dense and provocative non-fiction books – as well as an unapologetic gambler, a unique creative artist whose vision transcends expectations, outstrips her contemporaries, but carries her audience with her. She jumps, and the parachute opens. We’ve seen her do it so many times before.
‘Meditation in an Emergency’ (2012) was one of Sundfør’s most soothing instrumental works, and here, whatever the emergency – climate, though she says there’s much that can be done; cultural, though she treads a vertiginous path between its traps; social, which is what she stresses here, with the simple need to ‘be present’ – the escape route is the same.
“This concert is unusual, perhaps a little dogmatic,” she shrugs in her spoken introduction (in Norwegian the first night, in English the second). And so it is: a suite of six songs, dating from 2012 to present, re-arranged for organ and voice, and lasting an hour in total. Both musicians are unseen, the audience intended instead to meditate on the space and the sound that swells to fill it. Tonsberg Cathedral (accessible only be rail-replacement bus this weekend) is a small, beautiful, unpretentious church that seats around 250; Bragernes Kirke in Drammen can house a further 200, and comes with a more immersive AV experience, the lights dimmed, then cycling through the spectrum.
The results of all this are astounding: atavistic, exalting, eternal.
The first thing to say is simply that Sundfør has the single most beautiful voice I have ever heard – beyond Sandy, or Ferrier, or Sam Cooke, or Roy Orbison – and that to be in its presence, in its prime, feels like the most absurd privilege. More than that, though: she has an artistic restlessness exemplified by the way that, like Sandy, she sings every song differently every time, teasing out new intricacies, paraphrasing or ornamenting melodies, toying with meaning like a great Hamlet. On the first night, ‘Can You Feel the Thunder’, played for the first time in years, leaves you breathless and broken, its simple tale of a matador soaring in Tonsberg as it never did on record. The following evening, she tries something different with the song, injecting a panicked urgency, and the magic is partially lost, or else transferred to ‘When’ (also from The Silicone Veil (2012)), which climbs out of the setlist, having reached a skeletal and stripped-back perfection. “You take what you can,” she says, falling onto a blue note that was never there before. From now until the end of the time, that performance will lie among my favourite memories.
In Tonsberg, I was sat next to two men who’d come from Poland and Slovakia especially for the show. “We’re Susanne superfans,” one said proudly, the most relatable thing anyone’s said to me in quite some time. He responded to music in the same way I do, which augmented the experience. Whenever Sundfør tossed off some moment of instinctive vocal witchcraft, he chuckled to himself and shook his head in wonderment, which is exactly how I feel. My head is in almost perpetual motion throughout these shows: amused by the inspiration, embracing the sorrow, then the catharsis. My neighbour also occasionally, whisperingly, took the Lord’s name in vain, which is a bit disrespectful in a church, though since God gave Sundfør that voice, I suppose we can let him off.
“I never even knew you were a man of faith, till I heard you whisper it,” Sundfør sang in 'alyosha', the lead single off her last album, and a song about her husband. Previously a mildly outspoken atheist, she has since segued from a (to borrow one of her favourite words) dogmatic belief in science to a more profound search for spirituality and wonder in both music and life – something we chatted about when I interviewed her last year. That search has led her here, and the way her art interacts with faith and God in these shows throws all kinds of interesting new light on the material.
That is most literal, in all ways, when she closes the main set with ‘When the Lord’, a devastating song written for the documentary Self Portrait (the only song, as such, that she released during her near-total hiatus between 2017 and 2023). In Tonsberg, the song stretches her head voice to the limit; in Drammen it’s in a different register, and at a different speed – surely the slowest anyone has sung in a church since the Trinity Sessions. “When the Lord has descended,” she wails, and the light a soft red on the crucified Christ hanging above the altar.
In a Catholic moment, I wrote in last year’s interview piece that those moments when Sundfør rips the top off her voice are “the closest thing in music to glimpsing God”, and the self-deprecating contrarian responsible for such flights of beauty blithely dismissed them as “just screaming”. Here, there was no distance between God and voice at all. I suppose I can summarise my faith by saying that I see the hand of God in things (a sentiment only partially spoiled by Maradona); in these shows, it rests on every moment.
At the close of the first night’s organ-and-voice suite, the audience rises to its feet, and gives her a thunderous ovation (the following night, she characterises this response as people thinking the show was over, and attempting to leave, which is no more than half-true). She sweeps down the aisle, black-and-white dress and re-brunetted hair streaming, organist Kit Downes alongside her, and closes with a single number in front of the altar: the title track of her most recent record, blómi (2023), featuring the most (indeed, only) whimsical organ accompaniment of the evening. She plays just seven songs – When the Lord, plus two each from three of her last four records, Ten Love Songs skipped after its lively supporting role in Bergen – in a performance that runs a little under 70 minutes, and yet it is one of the half-dozen greatest shows I’ve ever heard (‘seen’ doesn’t quite seem appropriate here), and my favourite since the Before Times.
On the first night, you can turn and gawp at her if you have the gall and curiosity and social chutzpah; on the next, she is entirely invisible. That second show is the same but different, in the classic Sundfør style: same concept, same setlist and in the cosmic sense the same result – but play me any song from the soundboard and I’ll tell you which night it’s from.
The surface feeling at these shows is that you’re in the presence of a genius, whose instinctive understanding of music and melody is intellectually exhilarating, but all of that is subservient to something more primeval and important. The experience is – beyond anything else – deeply, deeply moving, emotionally overwhelming, in fact, stirring you somewhere far beneath your critical faculties, music history books or Pitchfork star ratings.
During the first show, Sundfør wavers on ‘Mantra’, compressing the melody into monotony – a playful drone – then stretching it in the oddest places. ‘ashera’s song’ is starkly meditative at first, before it begins to build. When a bloke from Nashville who’s come over for the Drammen show enthuses to me about her voice control, this is what he means: that blast of power, Sundfør’s gift wandering around the octaves, and with anyone else it would feel like showboating, but you get the sense she’s just searching for the truth of the song.
The next night, ‘Mantra’ becomes a hymn, and ‘ashera’s song’ a portal into the artist’s soul, her vulnerability all the more touching because it isn’t glimpsed too often.
The organ plays – a 10-minute improvisation to open, then bridging the gaps between songs – and you remember how key instrumentals are to the Sundfør oeuvre: her wordless concert album, (A Night at Salle Pleyel), the showy, off-kilter solos that pepper Live at the Barbican, the extended diversions in Memorial and The Sound of War (which gets a dazzling airing here, hanging hauntingly on its climactic line, “A red blinking Zion”), and the harpsichord coda she threw onto the end of her floorfilling electro-pop banger, Kamikaze. But for me it’s the voice. Isn’t it always. It weaves in and out, climbing towards the heavens.
And when she sings, nothing else matters.
***
Setlist:
[extended organ intro]
Mantra
ashera's song
Can You Feel the Thunder
When
The Sound of War
When the Lord
ENCORE:
blómi
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