Various Artists : Jordsvingninger

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Jordsvingninger review

From paintings informing symphonies to artists’ stories told through modern conceits like mixtapes and musicals, fine art has inspired musicians for centuries. In the moment or, at worst, in hindsight we can understand most of these connections between sight and sound. But how would one first think to square music with Edvard Munch, one of art’s great one-hit wonders outside his home nation of Norway? His global reputation seems to rest solely on 1893’s The Scream, a masterpiece of abstracted forms and pastel colors, its subject’s face a timeless expression of existential horror to be reproduced across college campuses and remixed throughout pop culture.

How do you bring up Munch’s name, not associate him with dread and fear, and not conjure up songs to match—sludgy, metallic, industrial, noisy? For the new compilation Jordsvingninger, that solution required fortunate coordination between the Munch Museum and the Smalltown Supersound record label, each in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. Smalltown founder Joakim Haugland had long sought a satisfactory way to bring together disparate musical acts to celebrate both label and land, and finally found his path via a Munch exhibit mounted in mid-2024 that lent its name (“trembling earth”) to this album, as did individual artworks’ Norwegian names to the titles and inspirations of songs on it.

The show focused on Munch’s landscapes and images of interactions that highlighted his interest in different philosophies of existence: humanity, nature, the cosmos. While it included The Scream, the rest of it portrayed him as more versatile than his stylistic and thematic legacies outside of Norway suggest—geography and anatomy full of detail (Women Turned Towards the Sun), bright colors used in service of joy and piety (Towards the Light), dark scenes implying tranquility (1893’s Starry Night) instead of far worse. Jordsvingninger the album helps transmit this information about the art show to the rest of the world like picking a clean font for a resumé.

There’s still plenty of gloom to surround and misdirect listeners, and appropriately enough it opens and closes the album. Deathprod’s dark ambient “Mot iyset” (Towards the Light) kicks things off with a vibrating drone that could be the locomotion of a large automaton. Two brass players by trade, Eivind Lønning and Bendik Giske, respectively use struck metal and violent saxophone bleats to explore different visions of “Mot skogen” (Towards the Forest), Munch’s ever-evolving prints commenting on fear of the unknown. In between there’s delicate yet dissonant piano, torn-paper noises that contrast harshly with the peaceful landscape Snølandskap fra Thüringen (Snow Landscape from Thuringia), and a squeezebox-like tribute to Munch’s series Stoffveksling (Metabolism).

But mostly calm, even fragile music makes up the remaining two-thirds of these Edvard Munch interpretations. The Scream itself gets the only song here with vocals, as Jenny Hval’s art-pop duo Lost Girls construct the rambling family dynamic of “Skrik” over a cacophonous melody of scraping whispers and beeping feedback. Muted techno rests at this compilation’s heart, with rRoxymore adding a new dimension to the human connection displayed in “Møte i verdensrommet” (Meeting in Space) before bleeding into Actress doing the same in “Solstråler” for the prismatic landscape of The Sun. Everywhere else we hear contemporary classical, found-sound and experimental ambience, references to archaic music, and hints of soothing jazz.

It seems miraculous when musicians shoot for the moon with a concept album and successfully hit their mark. The Smalltown Supersound roster on Jordsvingninger manages to do it twice: documenting their quality within indie niches and microgenres, and recentering one of the art world’s most niche successes as a heretofore underappreciated master of beauty and variety.


Label: Smalltown Supersound

Year: 2025


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