NORWAY'S SUSANNA AND ENSEMBLE NEON TO RELEASE THE FORESTER
SEPTEMBER 17TH ON SUSANNASONATA
One year following the release of Wild Dog (Rune Grammofon), Norwegian songstress Susanna returns with a new album to be released on her own label, SusannaSonata, on September 17, 2013. Active for more than a decade through eight albums released under the names Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, Susanna, and Susanna Wallumrød, the Oslo based artist has recently been taking great steps towards more independence and autonomy, while increasing the range of her considerable talents as a songwriter, vocal interpreter and producer. She's known for both her own songwriting and her huge range of highly personal interpretations of other people's songs, including Dolly Parton, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Joy Division, Scott Walker, KISS, amongst others. She is an intensely arresting performer, holding audiences captive with her hypnotizing vocal timbre and the powerful, all consuming sound of her band.
Susanna's first new, full-length release on her own label, The Forester, is a co-production with the Norwegian contemporary music group, Ensemble neoN. It combines the antique notes of the Baroque theorbo, woodwinds and strings, and Susanna's sparse piano, and features Susanna's strongest songwriting to date.
Picking from new tracks and several already released songs by Susanna, composers Julian Skar and Jan Martin Smørdalmade new arrangements suited to the eight-piece Ensemble neoN, and extended the title track into a fifteen-minute, three-part suite in which dark woods shroud a wanderer in a symbolic landscape of searching and loss. Being lost or deliberately straying from the chosen path are recurring themes on The Forester, whose subject matter ranges from disturbing natural environments to alien visitors, painted on an eerily exquisite canvas that recalls Mark Hollis, Tim Buckley, Kate Bush and Claude Debussy while remaining uniquely Susanna's soundworld. Recorded entirely live in one single, emotionally intense day at Oslo's legendary Rainbow Studio, produced by Deathprod and Susanna and engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug, The Forestercaptures Susanna's composition and all the nuances of her distinctive voice in neoN's deceptively simple chamber-folk tapestry.
Download hi-res album art and images of Susanna - www.pitchperfectpr.com/a_susanna.html.
The Forester preview -
Susanna Feat. Siri Nilsen & Susanne Sundfør's "Death Hanging" -
The Forester Tracklisting:
1. The Forester I, II & III
2. Hangout
3. Oh, I Am Stuck
4. Intruder
5. Lonely Heart
"Who knew starkly profound morbidity could sound so gorgeous?" - Pitchfork
"[Susanna's] simplicity can be considered studied. In a way, the song isn't even a showcase for lyrics as much as it is the timbres of the human voice, and the minute sonic space between the harmonies." - Ad Hoc
"limpid-voiced, open-hearted, musically idiosyncratic and touched with mystery." - The New York Times
"Beautiful, spare, hypnotic." - MOJO
"Wallumrød sings with dazzling clarity and exquisite patience, shaping melodies with care and sensitivity and tightly controlling her emotional engagement with the material. . . " - Chicago Reader
Susanna online: