Sea Of Sighs, Showtime, and Beyond

Looking ahead, lagging behind, on the sea of sighs

On New Year’s Eve it dawned on me that Y2K was 25 years ago, which reminded me that I’ve been a somewhat professionally recording artist for 25 years. A wild thought!

But wilder things have been, stranger yet to come. Happy New Year, and thanks for listening and following through yet another one.

While I’ve been working away on the next album this past year, I’ve also gone on a few journeys, playing a few shows here and there, in Japan, USA, London and Norway, catching Stevie Wonder in NYC, Joni Mitchell in LA, vacationing in Venice. Living a little.

On one of these journeys, while having a few days off in Tokyo, I started working on an instrumental piece. I had felt inspired by a concert I went to a few nights before, when I got to experience the Japanese artist Ichiko Aoba. It made me think about creating pieces that could function as anticipation music to be played in a concert hall while the audience are waiting for the concert to start. Or home alone, when you need to get away. I first used pre-existing elements that I had lying around from previous sessions and shows, that I looped and stretched and messed around with.

When I returned home to Norway I started another piece, using a string quartet arrangement combined with endless loops of Alexander von Mehren’s piano from a live recording of my song “Patience”. I sent these two first pieces to Jørgen Trœen for some input, tweaking and mix. I also had Kato assemble some more string quartet sessions in Bergen that I thought might come in handy. In 2022 I had him write two string arrangements for a special Avatars show in Bergen. These arrangements now served as starting points for new instrumental pieces. We went back and forth, tweaking and reimagining these little pieces of more esoteric and minimalist music.

The results are “Sea Of Sighs”, a 6-track EP of largely instrumental, minimalist majestic ambient music which was finalized right before Christmas, and which will be available digitally next Friday. I’ll share more later, once the full EP is out, including a playlist of relevant inspirations.

Keen listeners may come to recognize several elements and chord sequences from songs of the past, so if this collection plays like a fever dreamish Easter Egg-hunt through fragments of my songs, that’s just grand. It’s been over decade since I developed a serious appreciation of abstract and ambient music, and some of what some people call Neo-classical tendencies. I don’t always know what to call it, but I’ve long labeled it patient music in my own mind. I gravitate towards a need for patient music more often than not. At times I want to call it majestic minimalism! Other times it’s more subdued and discrete. Inspirations come from many different sources, but for this collection I want to mention Kali Malone, Gigi Masin, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Norway’s own maestro of ambient, Biosphere, specifically.

For now you can listen to Showtime 2.1, which is out today — and pre-save Sea Of Sighs on Bandacamp or elsewhere, that way you’ll have it when it drops on January 10.

A lot of Sea Of Sighs music will also be a part of my two big performances at the Oslo Opera House on January 12. There are still around 100 tickets left for the first show, but they are going fast and the shows will sell out shortly.

As some of you may have noticed and heard, this year’s annual Christmas cover was a version of Chappell Roan’s instant classic «Good Luck, Babe!». You can download it from Bandcamp, or stream it via Stereogum, and read on from what I wrote on the night we recorded it:

«It’s 8pm in Bergen, Norway on December 21st. I just finished recording vocals for this year’s cover. Producer Matias Téllez and I first joined in this tradition together in 2013 (I had tried doing it on my own a few years earlier, but it was not nearly as fun). If you’re new to the tradition: we pick the huge hit we feel most compelled to cover at the end of each year, and record and mix it in one day. Then we share it with fans and followers the next day. Tonight, when Matias is done mixing this year’s track, we’re fortunate enough that we once again can go out to eat, drink and be merry, and then wish each other Merry Christmas, or God Jul, as we say around these parts. We’ve spent a lot of time in the studio together this year, recording my next album, and next year we’ll record some more. But for now this is our final offering of 2024: our interpretation of Chappell Roan’s glorious «Good Luck, Babe». This year’s choice is one we picked with some hesitation, simply because both the song itself and the recording of it, is so perfect, meaningful and strong. It’s of course one of the biggest hits in a year full of really wonderful big hits. A very competitive year, so many huge songs that united more people than they polarized. Lord knows we needed it. Enormous, beautiful pop songs won’t save the world or mankind, or end wars or the slaughtering of always-innocent children. And the way the world seems to be going now, many of us feel helpless, and even complicit in every gruesome thing humans inflict upon this planet and each other. «You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling». The truth will come out. It cannot be contained, or resisted, forever. «Good Luck, Babe» is a punch in the gut for the way it calls out, not just its object of desire for not daring to live truthfully, but also society for making it so damn hard to be who you really are, and love who you really love. Love can be challenging, but the challenge at the center of «Good Luck, Babe» is more complex than even that. This was the part of the song I most wanted to protect. There is no wonder why the original is so impactful, and even if our version only poses the question: what if «Good Luck, Babe» was arranged by the late great Ryuichi Sakamoto, maybe that’s already reason enough for yet another version to exist. I’m wishing you and yours love, compassion and music, always.»

Agreed, with love,

SL

PS! I wrote and recorded a deeply existential and sincere Christmas song last year that I forgot to tell you about. It’s too late now, but here it is, you can even try to sing along!