SOUP
Norwegian instrumentalists evolve on their visionary sixth album.
THE BEST PROGRESSIVE music is full of twists, turns and hair-raising surprises. The brainchild of Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Erlend Aastad Viken, Soup’s latest album, Visions, seems to be almost entirely composed of such things. Viken originally conceived it as a solo project in 2005, but here his band pull off the shrewd trick of sounding like a million things at once, and yet like absolutely nothing you have ever heard.
“You’re talking to a guy who wrote his master’s degree on musical identity!” laughs Viken. “There’s a term I’d like to call musical DNA, or musical identity, and that’s everything you listen to, but just reassembled in a new way, creating something that’s unique to you. So with us there’s a mix of everything from Bowie and Celine Dion and U2 and Sigur Rós and Mogwai. All of that stuff is mixed together and it comes out as Soup.”