Norwegian pop music’s errant genius has done many confounding – and utterly apposite – things since swerving away from the fame game in 2018: going back to school to study psychology, performing behind her audience during the now near-mythic ‘church shows’ of 2024, and treating Oslo’s sunny Piknik i Parken festival as the ideal setting in which to reintroduce us to the malevolent throbbing of her song, ‘Insects’. But a forthcoming album in which she sets the 14th century religious writings of Julian of Norwich to music is, I think we can safely say, not what many of the other leading figures of the 2010s electro-pop scene are currently working on.
It gives us five minutes of breathtaking beauty at the heart of this show, in the shape of ‘Blessed Wounds’.
For me, hearing – and listening to – Sundfør’s voice is a religious experience. I don’t mean in the evasive secular sense, whereby art and human beauty are meant to replace God. I mean that I find her voice and the idea of God indivisible. I feel God’s hand in her music, glimpse him in the places she goes. Her voice does many things during this show, but ‘Blessed Wounds’, adapted from Revelations of Divine Love, finds her miraculous gift at its clearest and most simply beautiful. “It is His office to save us,” she sings, lifting you way above. Then her voice starts to soar too.
I work in a venue and see quite a lot of shows. Last year I bopped to Annie Lennox, shadow-boxed to Public Enemy, grooved to BANKS. But for me, while the effect of most gigs is pleasant, even rousing, it's on some level superficial. The two artists who bless me with transcendence, who drag me out of the mire and drop me onto some higher plane, like an eagle nicking a baby in an early silent film, are Susanne Sundfør and Adrianne Lenker. They don’t actually have much in common, aside from an initial acquaintance with the folk milieu, and a quicksilver connection to the vastness of existence. But one has a turn of phrase akin to having the back of your head unscrewed. The other can do things with her voice that make Roy Orbison sound like Damon Albarn.
Today that voice is filling Palmehaven, which is as handsome as a hotel restaurant is ever likely to get. It has a sunken floor with a central fountain, a mock skylight filled with glittering stars, and palms that appear to be getting in some people’s way. For this show, an obligatory three-course meal is provided with every ticket (I was granted an alternative to the reindeer main). I can, with force of will and a favourable wind, zone into an experience and live there, but the bass pulsing through to the venue from the hotel bar next door, and the occasional clatter of crockery being collected, still seems an odd way for the world to interact with incalculable beauty. It’s like if Robert Kennedy’s Aeschylus peroration upon the death of Martin Luther King had been interrupted by someone playing Mambo No. 5 on their phone.
For this show, the final one of a short run of four dine-then-listen concerts, Sundfør is joined by her husband, jazz musician André Roligheten, who will play around her melodies in apparently semi-improvised style, slipping into keys and flights of avant garde fancy that I can enjoy without even beginning to understand them on anything but an emotional level.
For its part, ‘ashera’s song’ gives a lie to the (awful! Sexist! Kid-phobic! ‘70s-coded! Farcically still expressed today!) idea that parental songs are a baneful chore for the listener. This one is an elusive slip of a song that snakes past, showering you with sparks. Sundfør’s shows always have a narrative built into their setlist and heightened by performance, often travelling (as single songs like ‘Mountaineers’ and ‘Trust Me’ do) from something unresolved in theme and tune to a place of escape. At sit-down, scaled-down, stripped-down shows like this one, she always loves playing ‘Bedtime Story’ from Music for People in Trouble (2017). Synths are for summer festivals. Here the business is to rip away everything, to the point of purity, then complicate what remains with free jazz flourishes. Starting the show at the grand piano, dressed comfortably all in black, her hair back to its natural dusty brown, Sundfør's latest reading of the song hurls its dynamics in wild new directions. Her voice is climbing in a way it never previously has while telling this bedtime story, rendering its tale misleading, and its narrator lofty and cunning. She lollops languidly into a postmodern playfulness on “You know the chord before it’s played”, before signing off in wearily philosophical style. That’s the cue for Roligheten to break into a clarinet solo with shades of the 2018 full-album tour, where such semi-improvised pieces linked the songs, and turned the record into a suite.
That tour was also a memorable showcase for ‘The Sound of War’, which comes next in Trondheim. Sundfør wrote it after watching a BBC documentary on Gaza, and of late has been programming the song relentlessly, and performing it with startling urgency. As in 2018, she accompanies herself solo on guitar, but here the inflections flirt with Flamenco. It is such a formally clever song, especially in this detailed arrangement (necessarily absent the sonic explosions punctuating the full-band version). Her vocal trills oscillate between notes that call to mind the ‘red blinking Zion’ of its climax, yet that later part is built instead around a drone sound – emitted in Palmehaven by her collaborator – unlike the section that deals explicitly with drone warfare. It is a showcase for almost every part and virtue of her voice. She falls onto a blue note on “the snow… falls down”, pins you back with slow-mounting power, then flies into her head voice.
One miraculous thing about Sundfør as an artist is that restless imagination and invention: that sheer reluctance to ever sing a line the same way twice (something she has in common with the great jazz and soul vocalists, and in the folk world with Sandy Denny). That comes to mind especially in the case of ‘Can You Feel the Thunder’ (always just ‘Thunder’, on her printed setlist). This portrait of a matador was a decent album track in 2012 that in its recent live iterations ranks with the greatest songs ever written. You could argue that her performance at the Drammen church show was definitive, but the more profound joy lies in the fact that, like any Sundfør gig, each one is the greatest in a different way. Built here around insistent, driving piano arpeggios, it spotlights The Silicone Veil’s smirking refusal to simplify any tune into the straightforwardly pretty, yet its jagged magnificence gets its estoque into you. It is a stunning version: her voice at its most metallic, the aural equivalent of licking aluminium, before it flashes silver and morphs into gold.
She follows it with ‘blómi’, the title track of her last record, and a song of which she’s clearly proud, performing it at climactic moments in each of the six shows I’ve seen her play since she released the album. Each time she teases out different inflections, different meanings from now familiar lines. How many different ways can a woman sing the words “in love”, which here are flushed with warmth? She wrings such emotion from the cryptic promise “that the ladies in black will wear white again”, by first landing on and then tossing off this outrageously unexpected succession of notes. Yes, as an audience member you are an emotional wreck, but also sit slack-jawed in amazement. Now she’s scatting, and clearly in the moment, dancing in and out of her accompaniest’s melody. The audience reaction is explosive, and she closes the song with a satisfied and knowing smile.
It's at this moment that Sundfør invites Julian of Norwich up onto the stage, in a manner of speaking. Hearing a new Sundfør composition for the first time is such a special feeling, and ‘What Are We’ – the title track of her upcoming record, and the first of the night's two new songs – shows the extraordinary potential in marrying these words to this artist. It is also the first number of the night to combine only clarinet and voice, the arrangement seeming to resemble the mic stand in front of Sundfør, with her vocal strong and straight, and the brass notes twining around it like a cord. The music industry is calculating and money-minded at the best of times, and one gets the impression that after the gold records and domestic awards of Sundfør's early years, it had a path all mapped out for her. She has followed her instincts instead; one is tempted to say her heart.
'What Are We's glimpse of a shimmering future is followed by the first two songs from Sundfør's 2017 album (in the end, nine of the night’s 11 songs come from her last two records or her next one). ‘Mantra’, also performed to clarinet accompaniment, has swelled over time to become one of my favourite Sundfør songs, her increasingly esoteric line readings pulling this simple folk song of crows and meadows into this surreal and irregular jazz world populated by weird pauses and melodic leaps into the unknown. She sings it with her eyes closed, in a version that seems to levitate. (See opening image above.)
This feeling is further compounded by the introduction of ‘Blessed Wounds’, an astonishing new song. Sundfør introduces it by squinting at the handwritten lyrics on the piano rack and explaining that without them she’ll risk having to break into “la la la”s and “yeah yeah”s (famously not canon for Julian of Norwich). Such music hall business gives way to a performance of virtuosic ambition. It is a showstopper that is also church music. A song of wonder and profound spiritual clarity, two pianos beneath a hand that is reaching across centuries. Simply: I feel my soul ascend. It seems wholly inappropriate to holler loutishly in response, so I refrain, but the applause is endless.
Since there is no natural backstage area in what is, and I can’t stress this enough, a hotel restaurant, our performers thank the audience and then loiter in a corner for a few moments, before coming back.
Their encore is ‘Trust Me’, the closer to Sundfør’s greatest record (and one of my two favourite albums of all time, along with Suede’s Dog Man Star): 2015’s Ten Love Songs. As ‘Mountaineers’ would later, it rises from squalor to catharsis, fearlessness and release. “Nothing’s ever easy when you take ecstasy,” Sundfør opens conversationally this evening, before moving through defiance (“You cannot erase me … like they do in the movies”) to profundity: “Baby you can trust me/Send for the saint/Send for the doctor/And save yourself.” At Union Chapel in 2017, when the song was also her encore, she proceeded to head for the heavens. This time she gives us that incomparable head-voice before sliding back down into chest to tease out the strangeness of the song’s climactic offer. Throughout, she sits with her eyes closed, and the hands in her lap shaping the words: fashioning the complexity of the emotion, or else being buffeted by it. They spasm in tandem with the delicate frenzy of performance… perhaps. But I think the purpose is to lift her voice. The one that lifts us way above.
***
ashera's song
Bedtime Story
The Sound of War
Can You Feel the Thunder
blómi
What Are We
Mantra
Reincarnation
Blessed Wounds
Fare Thee Well
Encore:
Trust Me
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Thanks for reading.
