Norwegian band broadens its sights
Updated: 2013-06-09 05:48
By Allan Kozinn(The New York Times)
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Kaizers Orchestra, whose high-energy music is a blend of blues and metal, sings only in Norwegian. Paal Audestad |
The circumstances could hardly be more odd: a Norwegian alternative-rock sextet whose performances are sung only in Norwegian went to New York recently to perform at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was their first and last performance in the United States.
And, by the way, they are dropping out of the music scene as well for an open-ended break.
"I sing in Norwegian all the time," said Janove Ottesen, a member of Kaizers Orchestra, in fluent English, "and when I perform live in, say, Germany, I know that they don't understand anything I'm singing. I'm doing my job, singing and telling stories - and they're good stories. The fans who understand it totally love it. They're so into it, they tattoo the characters on their bodies. So it will really be exciting to have these stories understood outside Scandinavia."
The group's music is an idiosyncratic amalgam of Scandinavian and Eastern European folk influences filtered through high-energy blues and metal.
Though it has a huge following in Scandinavia and devoted audiences elsewhere in Europe, the group is virtually unknown in the United States.
After a run of European festivals and nine valedictory performances in Stavanger, where it is based, Kaizers Orchestra is taking its break.
"We don't have any problems in the band," said Mr. Ottesen, the group's singer and principal composer, said. "We're just stopping touring, and stopping producing albums."
Mr. Ottesen and Geir Zahl - one of the group's two guitarists, and Mr. Ottesen's collaborator in a handful of bands since they were teenagers in Bryne, in southwest Norway - plan to transform "Violeta, Violeta," a complex rock opera, into a full-fledged music-theater piece.
Mr. Ottesen said that he and Mr. Zahl expected the project to occupy them for the next decade. They also planned to translate the work so it could travel internationally.
Why has Kaizers Orchestra steadfastly maintained its Norwegian-only policy, particularly when Mr. Ottesen and Mr. Zahl have each independently made discs that are in fully idiomatic English?
"Those albums are side projects," Mr. Ottesen said. "Our main project is Kaizers Orchestra, where we have a whole world that we've created, and that world is in Norwegian.
"Of course, we can express ourselves better in Norwegian, and we can write lyrics that have two, three or four layers, which is what I think makes a good lyric."
In musical terms Kaizers Orchestra is a band of polyglots. Arching melodic hooks are plentiful, as are archaic rhythms: Many of the group's songs are built around figures with accented weak beats of the kind that crop up in the early cabaret scores of the German composer, Kurt Weill, and in some Balkan dance forms.
Mr. Zahl said that he and Mr. Ottesen were not "directly inspired by that stuff, because we haven't listened to it that much." He added, "We're inspired by people who interpreted that music."
Among the influences he mentioned were songs from the 1937 Disney film, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"; music by Tom Waits; and English and American pop, rock and blues.
"The essential thing is we love to combine," Mr. Ottesen said. "We're not trying to make classic pop songs. We like to take things from as many different genres as we can and put them in the same song."
Perhaps the group's sound and theatricality are infectious enough to render the language barrier irrelevant.
That, at least, is the view of Limor Tomer, director of the Metropolitan Museum's concerts and lectures department.
"I find it liberating to listen to lyrics in a language I don't understand," Ms. Tomer said. "You're not shackled to the spoken word. You can make your own narrative."
The New York Times
(China Daily 06/09/2013 page12)