Last Thursday night we rocked up to Oslo for one of the most exciting events in the Scandinavian music industry calendar — by:Larm Festival. Basically Norway’s answer to The Great Escape or SXSW, it’s a giant citywide showcase of incredible new artists from Scandinavia and further afield. Already big fans, for 2018 we teamed up with the festival for the first time, taking over the legendary riverside rock venue Blå.
The citywide festival saw grimy techno basements flooded with international music fans, a 19th century church host everyone from Rytmeklubben to Reykjavikurdaetur, and lectures on everything from mental health in the industry, to AI in music and the many shades of black metal were given. It was a very cold, icy riot.
Our personal highlight was the totally eclectic line-up on the i-D presents stage at Blå. Smalltown Supersound-sign Carmen Villain kicked things off with a moving and genre-defying performance accompanied by live flute and bonus vocals from Jenny Hval, who features onBorders from Carmen’s 2017 album, Infinite Avenue. What a combo.
Next up was eccentric local electro-pop band Das Body, whose brilliant singer Ellie Linden commanded the attention of everyone in the packed out crowd before Berlin-based techno DJ Courtesy very much took over. Taking the mood from pop-rock to Berghain, dry ice and dancing ensued as Courtesy seamlessly mixed vinyl and digital across a far too short 30-minute set. She rules.
Oslo musician Vivana Vega needs to give herself a pat on the back for naming her latest project, WHALESHARKATTACKS, so well. On her Facebook page she describes her sound as “808 goth/dark RnB/MIDI-punk/nihilist trap” and that’s, somehow, exactly how it sounded.
Showing up to the venue fashionably late, LA-based performance artist Yves Tumor took the good people of Blå to another dimension entirely. The lights went off, the strobes started up, the core-trembling bass and impassioned yelling began. We were no longer in a club, the room was some kind of installation and we were a part of it.
Credits
Photography Jonathan Vivaas Kise