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The Arbiter of Change

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Artwork by Marius Svendsås Well, US elections came and went and the pendulum swung back on itself to smash into the establishment. Go figure, genocide, war, censorship and assassinations are not all that popular it seems. So then the populist rises. For this song I have tapped into history to catch the zeitgeist of the times, chronicling the rise of the Arbiter of Change who will bring about a new order to the realm. Morten Boland Jørgensen does the bass and my childhood friend Marius Mathisen Svendsås made a lead guitar for the history books, as well as crafting an elegant piece of cover art. Arbiter of Change - Streaming In addition, I have redone Joy & Pain, Vol. I with my band in Kysten Studio at Tvibit. With Sivert Henriksen as our producer, we went ahead with re-recording all 5 songs, churning out a bolstered startup EP for my project. Henrik Haukland, who now has moved south and has released an album on his own as Haukland, did an amazing lead guitar. Morten J. did super sol...
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Sideways

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In times of crisis, it is sometimes consoling to hear of others being in a similar situation. Sideways is a song of such nature. It is a song that describes a period of my life that perhaps wasn't so easy. It is also a song that chronicles my struggles of becoming a musician with a wide audience, as my audience still does not extend very far. However, it is also only my seventh song, so who knows what the future will bring. Sideways is also a song that represents a different type of crisis. The type that is brought about by chronic perfectionism and the standards held by modern music production. Not only that, but Sideways as a song demands such enourmous standards. Some ideas, some songs and melodies, some works of art are of such a character that their conception require the highest standards of production. And so it is with Sideways. It is just a song, yes. But to me, its capture could never harbor any lesser of a quality than the highest and most qualified means of production...
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Seek Me Out

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3:32. That's about the time it takes for someone to listen to my new single, Seek Me Out. Not that I specifically aimed for a radio-friendly playing time. I guess, when you follow the dreadfully predictable formula of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-chorus, it just automatically clocks in at 3:30 or so. That being said, it's not a waste of time to listen to the song, because it doesn't take much time. All you need to do is to seek me out and seek out the song, and that's fairly easy. This time around, I did all the work myself. Recording, mixing and mastering, all the way. At the end, I received some sharp and competent consultation from my good friend Thomas Hoel, who has a degree in sound production. Said consultation lifted the mix to new heights, so now I can sleep well at night, knowing that the song has gotten some proper attention. For the coverart, me and my good pal Lars Ervik took the bus over the bridge to check out the only phone booth left in Tromsø, w...
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The ++

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Last Wednesday I had the privilege to host my very first full-length concert at Prelaten in Tromsø. With me in my band I had Henrik, Vegar and Sam, like last time, and they absolutely killed it. But I wasn't the only one to play, as Sam was able to enroll two other talented artists for the concert, filling the line-up. Ragnar Teisrud and Håkon Johnsen impressed with their solo performances, making it easy for me to sit down and appreciate the music before I was to hit the stage myself. Sam himself had three songs to offer, most notably Monkey Says Monkey Do, so we opened by playing those, before the solo artists went on. I had the chance to play the bass guitar in a band for the first time, which was surprisingly fun. We got some monkey sounds from the audience, so I am pretty sure they were happy to see us monkeying about on stage. For my concert, we played all of the songs from Joy and Pain Vol. 1 and a single I'll be releasing later this year, Sideways. The ++ re...
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Tvibit - a local success story

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Tvibit is nothing short of a perfect place for artists of any kind in Tromsø. Superprofessional sound engineers, top notch equipment and locales and lots of good people ready to help up-and-coming artists and creative people in need of a helping hand. It's also the hub for Buktafestivalen and Rakettnatt. Run by Tromsø kommune, I must say, public initiatives in Norway can offer much more than power-socialist Soviet knockoffs, especially when it comes to culture. It's quite a privilege. All photos by Svein-Roger Johnsen Thursday 6. of december 2018, I had the chance to play there live and it was a wonderful experience. For the first time, I had a band with me on stage. The concert being at 5 PM and a 20 minute set made it a perfect rain check for a first-timer for my newly founded band. Safe to say, nobody needed a rain coat. The band absolutely blew my mind. Sam had learned the songs on bass within three weeks, Henrik played like a guitar god and Vegar does some sick stu...
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Updating my acoustic portfolio

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Acoustic releases always offer a sense of intimacy that studio releases don't. It's as if you're there, in the room, with the artist; hearing the breathing noises, mistakes, the screeching of acoustic guitar strings as the fingers attempt to make the sounds needed to get the song across. It's a little more real, more honest than the typical studio mega-production of music, glossing over every minor flaw in the soundstage. Personally I think every song should have its own acoustic version, so that's why I've started working on my own acoustic album. Some of its songs are already out on my website. It's a work in progress, so it might not be that the recordings on the end product will be the same as they are now. Gotta gloss over some of those mistakes, you know... Link to my acoustic songs Photo: Stan Serdjukov
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Joy and Pain

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Joy and Pain, Black and White. Soccer or Football. The essences of life. That's probably the theme for my first EP ever (except for that one which I released years ago, the one that I never talk about). Or maybe it's not the theme for the EP. Who the fuck knows? Listen for yourself and make up your mind. I am not gonna make up your mind for you. I am an artist, not a politician. I don't pretend to know what I am talking about. Anyway, great thanks to my friends Michael Mühl and Thomas Hoel for their contributions to the album. Michael for his picturesque capture of me in front of a tagged wall in the troubled city of Belfast and Thomas for his amazing bassline on In My Own Mind, a bassline I had no idea of how to solve on my own, but man did he nail it! Also, thanks to Sivert Henriksen for mixing and mastering the songs. I mixed Biological Being and The Comeback Kid myself, but it was a great thing that he was there to master the songs into a cohesive unit for the EP. Gre...
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