Geir Sundstol

Ambient goes country and David Bowie and Brian Eno share a tune with John Coltrane in slide guitar maestro Geir Sundstol's astonishing cinematic travelogue.

Wizard of Strings Geir Sundstøl is back with his fourth solo album, St.Hanshaugen Steel. The title is an homage to the long gone steel factory located on his own stomping ground, and also a reference to Sundstøl’s reputable broad spectrum-treatment of the pedal steel guitar.

Geir Sundstøl has made a name for himself as an innovative session musician on hundreds of Norwegian and international albums. 2015 saw the release of Furulund (HUBRO 2533CD/3533LP), the first self-composed long player from this master of strings. Langen Ro, Norwegian Grammy winner Brødløs and St.Hanshaugen Steel (HUBRO 2642CD/3642LP), followed soon after. Now, the stage is set for something quite different. The Studio Intim Sessions Vol. 1, Sundstøl's fifth solo album, has taken a trip on its own, away from the cinematic Nordic noir and genre-crossing soundscapes we know, and ended up somewhere south of the Kattegat.

Cinematic C&N (Country & Northern) goes Pacific as West Norway chapel grooves encounter Polynesian-influenced steel and slide featuring the amazing Geir Sundstøl on pedal steel. On the guitarist and composer Trond Kallevåg Hansen’s inspired and inspiring Hubro debut, edgily ambient and cinematic atmospherics meet front-porch picking from a super-sensitive folk and jazz inspired ensemble given serious twang by the legendary Geir Sundstøl on slide and pedal steel. Perfectly formed ear-worm melodies are stretched and bent into new improvised shapes as electric and acoustic instruments weave decorously in and out of each other’s orbits, accompanied by startling solo preludes or intersecting excerpts of experimental field recordings or found sound.

Cinematic C&N (Country & Northern) goes Pacific as West Norway chapel grooves encounter Polynesian-influenced steel and slide featuring the amazing Geir Sundstøl on pedal steel.

Musical balm for body and soul. The guitarist Trond Kallevåg Hansen has created fantastic music and brought along a cream coat with young Norwegian musicians as well as Geir Sundstøl himself when he made the commissioned work Bedehus and Hawaii for Sildajazz 2018.

Sometimes when forced into change, the best thing to do is toss what came before and shoot for something completely different. With Stian Westerhus leaving trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær's trio after three years of extensive touring and the sole, spectacular document Baboon Moon (Sula, 2011), Molvær's career—defined, since emerging in the mid-'80s with the acclaimed group Masqualero, by a restless drive for evolution and surprisingly regular revolution—was at a crossroad. If there's anything predictable about this spearhead to a new generation of Norwegian musicians with the groundbreaking Khmer (ECM, 1997), however, it's his complete and utter unpredictability.

Nils Petter Molvær, also known as NPM, is a Norwegian jazz trumpeter, composer, and producer. Molvær is considered a pioneer of "future jazz", a genre that fuses jazz and electronic music. Buoyancy - the ability or tendency of something to float in water; a cheerful and optimistic attitude or disposition. Recorded with the same group he had in the studio for "Switch", Nils Petter Molvær's new album "Buoyancy" is the logical continuation of its predecessor, whilst also taking the music a step further. Here the group works more closely as a unit and performs the music more spontaneously in the studio. A range of soundscapes, grooves and hauntingly beautiful little melodies emerge from the trumpet master's instrument to create an intense collection of colourful paintings in sound.