Eivind Buene
10
Romanticism deconstructed
Eivind Buene: »Schubert Lounge«
© PR
It is always a huge risk to re-interpret classical icons and drag them onto the contemporary scene, especially if you are an award-winning composer and musician of international fame, such as the Norwegian Elvind Buene. Classical music, like all genres, has its small circle of purists and aficionados that are prompt to flag down any attempt to move the statues they adore out of their mausoleums. And this is exactly what Eivind Buene does in his Schubert Lounge album.
The title itself announces an unorthodox approach to the famous German Romantic musical genius: a lounge is not exactly the type of room or architectural installation one would immediately associate with Franz Schubert. But what Buene points to is that Schubert’s music, and more specifically his songs, the famous lieder sung by Kathleen Ferrier and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, are about intimacy and that they can be heard today in the half-lit comfort of a lounge, as they were in a salon by candlelight.
There are ten songs on the album, all with their titles in English and without the corresponding German name. For instance, we have »The Sea« and »Beautiful Moon«, which are (very well) known as »Am Meer« and »An Den Mond«. The songs themselves are translated (or adapted) into English, turning the whole project into a singular musical object, which totally deconstructs the traditional prison walls of music history.
Eivind Buene’s voice does not compare with Ferrier’s or Fischer-Dieskau, and it doesn’t even try to. By re-arranging harmonics in modern dissonances and replacing the nuances with a surprising flatness of tone, sometimes switching to delicate higher notes, Buene tells us that classical music is not what we assume it to be: a motionless monument that keeps repeating itself. Turning Schubert into a transnational composer is a radical choice, and a real dangerous one, the risk being to be laughed at, shunned or, even worse, ignored. A Norwegian artist deciding to sing 19th century German lieder translated into English in 2022 is not just an act, it is a radical manifesto. As Buene has written in an article published online, »Music is always now in the sounding moment. Music is, in a sense, a history of unfinished work.«
And this album absolutely proves it.
© Mads Smidstrup, Aros
»Music for me is medicine, comfort and a kick in the ass. Community, joy, a vent. Poetic political compass. And over the years, music has also become a kind of life chapter, linked to specific places, times and people.«
Marie Arleth Skov is a Danish art historian who has lived in Berlin since 1999. She works at the intersection of art, sexuality and music, with a primary historical focus on surrealism and the punk movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Her book Punk Art History was published by Intellect Books (UK) in 2023. Most recently, she has curated the exhibition UNRULY. The Body in Punk, which can be seen at Aros Kunstmuseum in Aarhus in the autumn of 2026. The catalogue for the exhibition is published by Marrow Press.
© Guannan Kang
自由即兴创作比性爱更好! – »Free improvisation is better than sex.« According to drummer Kresten Osgood, the saying is attributed to Confucius. Whether the ancient Chinese philosopher ever uttered those words is doubtful. But the quote perfectly captures the spirit of one of the most unusual events at this year's Copenhagen Jazz Festival.
From 7–11 July, pianist Søren Kjærgaard and drummer Kresten Osgood will take over CC Taste on Amagerbrogade, performing daily from 2–4 pm among diners, dim sum and steaming hot pots.
When the Machine Starts Singing
Soli City: »Poetics of a New Estate«
© Clement Mogensen
With Soli City, the boundary between the organic and the synthetic is almost impossible to discern. What first appears to be an ordinary piano suddenly slips into a dizzying glissando. Soli City resembles a cyborg – half cello, half computer – fusing strings and voices into a seamless digital synthesis. The result is a science-fiction dream interrupted by surreal monologues and abruptly punctuated by the shrill click of a camera shutter.
That percussive camera-flash motif runs throughout both PARADOXE (2024) and the new album Poetics of a New Estate. Here, Harald Bjørn, the composer behind Soli City, further develops the sonic language introduced on its predecessor. Whereas PARADOXE staged the encounter between acoustic and digital sounds as an explicit confrontation, the two worlds now feel far more deeply integrated. Even the album's abrupt shifts seem entirely natural, as on »Rooms & Walls«, where a slurred vocoder and delicate string textures give way to an insistent drum groove.
Soli City's music embodies a distinctive form of self-reflection. As acoustic sounds bend, fracture and are interrupted by those recurring electronic flashes, we are reminded of Bjørn's remarkable ability to compose genuinely innovative music. Just as the most visionary science fiction remains rooted in the realities of its own time, every musical breakthrough carries echoes of the past. Soli City embraces these nostalgic resonances only to twist them into unfamiliar shapes.
With deceptively simple means, Poetics of a New Estate dissolves the boundary between nostalgia and contemporaneity. Like a true cyborg, Soli City reveals the divide between the digital and the acoustic to be less a fundamental opposition than an oddly arbitrary construction.
© Laura Cecilie Krogtoft
»Music, for us, is a fusion of different consciousnesses into a single shared focal point.«
The band Selvhenter was founded in 2010 by trombonist Maria Bertel, saxophonist Sonja LaBianca, violinist Maria Diekmann, and drummers Jaleh Negari and Anja Jacobsen. In 2017, Maria Diekmann left the group, and Selvhenter continued as a quartet.
Selvhenter’s sound is driven by a deep fascination with sonic textures, rhythmic displacements and polyrhythms, acoustic and electronic melodies, hard-hitting compositional choices, improvised beauty, and a sheer joy of creating and performing music. Selvhenter has played concerts both in Denmark and internationally. The group is also the nucleus of the artist collective Eget Værelse, which houses the members’ solo projects as well as collaborations such as Valby Vokalgruppe, SOLW, Nina Garcia & Maria Bertel, and G.E.K.
© PR
»Music for me remembers.«
Håkon Guttormsen is a Norwegian composer and trumpeter living in Copenhagen. He is educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Music and the Royal Academy of Rhythmic Music. He primarily composes scores for ensembles as well as music drama and opera. He is currently working on a work for solo violin and electronics for ILK Music’s concert series during CPH Jazz 2026 and on his first symphonic work, which will premiere at the academy in 2027. He is a member of nyMusik’s composer group in Norway and a board member of UNM Denmark.