Electronica/synth-pop duo Frost have revealed details (albeit sparse) of a new single release after a long period of inactivity. A new track from the Tromsø pair, ‘The Magician’, is set to go on sale on August 16th, and should be the first taster of the long-gestating and as yet unnamed follow-up to 2007’s Love! Revolution!. [...]

Stavanger’s Numusic, Norway’s largest electronic music and art festival, has a mouthwatering range of artists booked for this autumn’s event. Minimalist American composer Steve Reich takes over the ‘composer in residence’ slot filled by Arvo Part last year to present three concerts of his work, whilst veteran dub legend Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and pioneering hip-hop [...]

Röyksopp have posted what purports to be the artwork for their long-awaited companion album to the successful Junior — Senior — and sure enough the differences between the two that they have been talking up are pretty evident in the packaging too. Whilst Junior was all bright colours and lurid shapes, this Senior cover features… [...]

Celebrated extreme/progressive metal five-piece Enslaved have revealed the title of their latest opus: Axioma Ethica Odini. The meaning? My best attempts at sleuthing (i.e. some simple vowel-removal) only resulted in the still puzzling ‘Axiom Ethics Odin’, but over at the authoritative-sounding ‘Angry Metal Guy‘ blog a fan has posited Odin’s True Ethics, which sounds believable.
The [...]

Bergen’s fantastic Festival of Electronic Music and Art, Ekko, has unveiled the first first crop of artists who will take to this stage at this autumn’s event. Moderat, the intriguing supergroup bringing Modeselekor and Apparat together, currently top the bill, with Tim Sweeney, Warp’s Tim Exile, Australians PVT and hot-property Nosaj Thing among the foreign [...]

Initially released in 1999 Industrial Silence, Madrugada’s first and best record, is to be repackaged in a deluxe double CD version, due out on the 5th of July. The release will include a remastered take on the album itself, all the band’s early EP releases (including the pleasantly Cohen-esque “The Riverbed”), and four previously unreleased [...]

Remember Apparatjik, that supergroup including Guy Berryman from Coldplay, Jonas Bjerre of Mew and aA-ha’s own Magne Furuholmen? No, well you can be forgiven for letting it pass you by as the band have done very little to trumpet their existence. First they slunk together and casually revealed their collaboration, like someone scrawling ‘by the [...]

Oslo’s Prins Thomas is perhaps best known for his collaborations with the decade’s king of disco, Lindstrøm; the two friends giving out a pair of joint swirling prog-throwback electro albums (I and II) of patchy quality and arguably forming the bedrock of the capital’s thriving disco scene. Given that Lindstrøm’s success thus casts a formidable [...]

Femi Kuti, Jaga Jazzist, Ost & Kjex, Pastor, Fujiya & Miyagi, Serena Maneesh, Lindstrøm & Christabelle @ The Fix/Bergenfest. 30th April 2010 Bergen, Norway.
Serena Maneesh
The Fix, a collaboration between the organisers of the fantastic Ekko festival and Bergen’s sprawling Bergenfest, returns for a fourth year with its strongest programme yet. This largely electronic evening is [...]

A deeply divisive figure, Nils Bech has split the Oslo underground more starkly than most, with those taking sides increasing by the day as the hordes of the inquisitive are drawn to this camp curio. Formerly of distinctly tongue-in-cheek quartet Snuten, most notable for the cheesy lo-fi of the admittedly irrepressibly catchy “Easy” (chorus: “it’s [...]