STIAN WESTERHUS

Booking Agent : Giorgio Salmoiraghi

Stian Westerhus is back — and he has not returned quietly. After years lending his fire to Norwegian early black metal icons Ulver and steering his solo work deep into explorative songwriting, the Norwegian iconoclast now re-emerges with his most extreme music to date, redefining his guitar work from the ground up and diving head first again in to his solo performances — engulfed in lasers, challenging the very format of the concert in an abstract narrative.

His was never just about the instrument. All About Jazz heard his solo debut as an album that “utterly redefines the concept of solo recording,” placing him in the rare lineage of artists — Bailey, Frith, Hendrix — who don’t inherit a musical language but force their own through the guitar, whether it resists or not. His entire solo career, as one critic put it, has been “a process of constant challenge to himself.” Last year Westerhus wrote an opera for the Norwegian National Opera, as well as an album with Colin Stetson. Now there is new solo music in the pipeline, and a total reinvention of his iconic solo performance.

His concerts are as intimate as they are frightening: one man pressed up against a wall of amplifiers, close enough that the audience feels every scrape and breath, loud enough that the room itself seems at risk. And rising through it all is the voice — the instrument critics never saw coming. The Quietus marvelled at his “wonderful, no-holds-barred singing voice,” a voice heard “testing the limits of his considerable range,” while reviewers of Redundance singled out singing that reaches, in one critic’s words, “lyrical heights so far unimaginable.”

He demolishes, as one festival review put it, “usual notions of how a guitar should sound” — yet listeners walk out as from a church converted. That is the Westerhus experience: terrifyingly intimate with an expressive force that extends the dynamic range of life itself.

 
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