Posts Tagged ‘Shining’

The Quietus: Sax And Violence – Jørgen Munkeby of Shining (Norway) Interviewed

Posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010

As two of the most radical forms of music that emerged in the 20th Century jazz and metal don’t always make the best of bedfellows. Luckily Shining ignored this fact when they started on Blackjazz, says The Quietus’ John Doran, speaking to Jørgen Munkeby:

The Quietus: To what extent is calling your album Blackjazz a statement?

JM: Well obviously it’s a fairly bold thing. Maybe it might come across as big headed you know? But there have been a lot of bands who have done this before us… Venom did it. Ornette Coleman did it. Several times! He had a lot of albums with this kind of title. So we thought about it for about nine months and I decided finally that if someone was going to do it, it might as well be us. And as you say black metal is slowly developing into an art form in itself which can be separated from all the extra-musical stuff. This happens in all sorts of genres. You don’t have to wear corpse paint. You don’t have to wear black anymore. (Munkeby is dressed head to toe in black, all three times I meet him, JD) It’s predominantly known as a Norwegian thing even though lots of countries have done it.

We’re from Norway and we are educated jazz people but we also have grown up with metal so I felt we could get away with it. I think the album is good enough for us to get away with it and people don’t seem to be that bothered. If they are bothered then they’re more bothered because they don’t hear enough jazz or they don’t hear enough metal or that we don’t flag up the industrial side to it. But the music is more focussed than before and we had more time to reflect upon what we were doing and place ourselves in a historical/musical context.

The Quietus: Talking about placing yourselves into a context, you’re making a statement by covering ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’ by King Crimson. Do you see a through line, not just from bands like King Crimson and Frank Zappa but to projects like Bill Lazwell’s Massacre and John Zorn’s Naked City?

JM: Yeah, I do see that. I think it’s important to acknowledge that we are “standing on the shoulders of giants” [quote popularized by Isaac Newton, attributed to Bernard of Chartres]. There have been a lot of people doing the same thing before us. We are just a continuation. We’re hoping that our album… we’re offering our album in the hope that it helps to develop that kind of music. But we haven’t invented the whole thing. A lot of people say that right now, everything that can be invented has been invented and the only thing you can do is to try and make it better but I’ve read those quotes from people saying that in the 70s and as we know a lot of new things came along as genres in the 80s and the 90s so I suppose when you’re in the middle of it… when you are fully immersed into it, it’s hard to keep a track of the bigger picture of what’s going on.
We don’t really know what’s going on but we do hope our album will be remembered as something that helped music. And it’s not just that we’re standing on the shoulders of giants but there are a lot of people around us doing similar things as well. We were the ones who were rude enough to grab that title but there are a lot of people who could have done the same thing.

Continue reading: The Quietus | Features | 2010 A Glass Half Full | Sax And Violence: Jørgen Munkeby of Shining Interviewed.

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Roadburn 2010 by Achrome Moments Photography

Posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

We asked Paul Verhagen (Achrome Moments Photography) to share some of his finest photos of Roadburn 2010. Here are his choices:

Album of the day: Shining – Blackjazz

Posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Lovingly pinched from No Ripcord: Though “progressive” metal bands seem to be running rampant anymore, few carry the free jazz sophistication of Norway quartet, Shining, their double-dutch whirlwind of industrial cacophony and Zappa-esque musical deviation at times blurring the line between rupture and rapture. Their last album, Grindstone, demonstrated the ...read more

More bands announced for Roadburn 2010: Jex Thoth, Shining (NO) Ancestors, Los Natas & Monkey3 amongst others

Posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009

As you all may have noticed, the line-up for Roadburn Festival 2010 has been shaping up nicely.  In addition to the bands previously announced, we are very happy to announce the following acts: JEX THOTH, with siren Jex at the helm, play a distinctive kind of psychedelic doom that encompasses ...read more