Norwegian six-piece take post-rock to explosive new heights.
“THE THING I admire most in other bands and musicians, and strive to achieve myself, is an acute attention to composition – and how albums function as a whole and not merely as collections of independent songs,” guitarist and main composer Gustav Jørgen Pedersen explains, after Prog asks what sets Norwegian post-rockers Spurv apart from their peers in an oversaturated market.
According to him, Spurv exist in“a genre of music that has been very codified over the last decade or so”. The difference is that they’ve found a space in which to exist almost uniquely, due to their hypnotic yet enthralling combination of post-rock and orchestral magnificence, which is captured on their recent fourth album, Brefjære.“I think there’s no reason to listen to the same chord progressions played over and over again,” Pedersen continues,“accompanied by the same sounds and the same drum beats.”
The collective take a more considered approach to their craft. After a stringent composition process – which involves Pedersen’s initial writing and a followup co-composition with guitarist Eirik Ørevik Aadland and trombonist Simen Eifring – comes the improvisation. Ole-Henrik Moe (cello) and Kari Rønnekleiv (violin) joined Spurv in the studio for their previous album, 2018’s Myra, with“awesome” results from improvisation, Pedersen tells us.“This time, we asked Ole-Henrik and Kari again, as well as [Norwegian Grammy Award-winning violinist] Inger Hannisdal and Jørgen Bagheera Apeness [vibraphone],” he explains. They were invited to the studio to simply “respond” to the music Spurv had already recorded.
“What we don’t do is jamming and making music together in the rehearsal space,” Pedersen says.“We simply can’t do it.” Prog wonders why this might be.“We have tried, and it just becomes boring, standard music, easily identifiable as being in the style of Russian Circles, Explosions In The Sky or MONO.”
Far from being generic in composition, Brefjære tells the story of four main“characters”: a birch tree, a mountain, a butterfly, and the wind engaging in conversation.“The birch tree asks the mountain why the wind blows; it is, in a sense,
