When Norwegian singer/songwriter and artist Susanne Sundfør released her fifth album Music For People In Trouble in 2017, she received huge critical acclaim: Mojo called the album “striking”, The Guardian, “another triumph”, the Daily Mirror, “a career defining album of the year contender” – whilst The 405 hailed her as “an icon in the making”, and CMU as “one of the greatest artists of the last decade”.
Sundfør also presented Music For People In Trouble in a unique live show which took the intimate power of the album and elevated it to monumental proportion in an immersive audio-visual production. The show was played in just a handful of places across Scandinavia – plus one UK show at The Barbican, London on 21st May 2018. This very last show was recorded, and in the end of November 2019, the recording was released as a brand new live album.
“I’ve been touring on and off for a decade, and I felt like it was time to try something different with the way I perform my music,” Sundfør says about the show. “Unfortunately we didn’t get any good footage of the performance, it lives on in people’s minds, and there’s something unmodern and romantic that I like about that. You can’t google it. You’ll find snippets on Instagram, but it doesn’t reflect the three dimensional space of the beautiful concert halls we played in. It’s our little secret, our little, intimate moment together, us and the audience. But we got a good quality recording of the music, and that’s something at least.”
The concert version of Susanne Sundfør’s Music For People In Trouble takes music to new heights – and many of the songs to new lengths. Take a look at the video recording of Reincarnation to see for yourself.
Photo credits: Carsten Windhorst.
The album ‘Music for people in trouble: Live from the Barbican’ is now out through Bella Union / Live Here Now.