Trondheim Calling brings everyone back home

Home is Trondheim: a postcard town splashed with colourful wharf buildings. They line fjords in which otters play chase and jigsaw pieces of ice float under red-iron bridges. Frozen-over cobblestones lead past bulging bakeries, stone churches, and statues of reindeers and olympian speed skaters.

Nine months out of the year, an engaged student population fills the city’s impressive constellation of music venues – from dingy punk basements like Fru Lundgreen to sleek concert halls – but Trondheim is a ghost town in the summer months, I’m told, with some venues locking their doors during July and August. The internationally renowned music conservatory draws ambitious players from across Scandinavia, but many leave town once courses conclude. With 200,000 inhabitants, Trondheim feels more intimate than comparably sized UK cities such as Brighton. It’s easy to know, and easy to fall for.

In most cases, Trondheim is a city people are from, not where they’re going. Trondheim Calling reverses that pipeline. It calls everyone back: bookers, publicists, managers, publishers, labels, studio owners, and of course the artists. From across Norway, everyone congregates at home for three days of inspired, must-hear music from acts on the rise – and maybe everyone takes some of the city’s magic with them when they leave.

Sara Fjeldvær is someone who stayed. She’s an accomplished singer-songwriter with a crisp, kind voice and four albums behind her. She also co-founded Fjordgata, an indie label and artist collective that she runs with three friends. They met while studying at the aforementioned music school, NTNU, naming the label after the street they used to share a house on. Sara points it out to me: it’s right outside the conference hotel and hugs the fjord, hence fjordstreet. Her three friends have since decamped for Oslo. But Fjordgata – and Sara herself – remains committed to the Trondheim scene, to home.

“It’s very Trondheim-based because this is our hometown and this is where people know who we are,” Sara tells me of the label, which has so far released 10-15 albums in the malleable space of ‘pop-jazz’. “I love Trondheim and I’m an advocate for this environment and community, whilst Oslo is bigger, so we haven’t really gotten into the market,” she continues, content for the latter point to take as long as it takes. Sara is guided by “musical meetings” – connecting with others through art – rather than business goals. She has the same approach to people as she does to her town, prioritising learning, commitment, connection – as Trondheim Calling does.

“I have a hawk view,” she says of the city’s music scene. A local paper, Adresseavisen, one of the oldest in Norway, recently profiled her, disbelieving and delighted at her choice to stay and base her career out of the small city. “I love being here and making this city a culture city,” she continues. “It’s a different kind of struggle because if I were to move to Oslo – which I never would do – I would have to fight to be a voice, whilst here I fight to hear more voices.”

It’s a genuine problem for Trondheim and other Norwegian communities: young people making a run for the capital. It becomes a recurring theme of the conference talks. “Norway’s such a small country and it’s so wide. There’s a six-or-seven-hour drive to Oslo,” Sara says. “Almost everything happens there. Everyone is moving, so the cities kind of die everywhere else.”

For those stopping by during the final three days of January, the music scene in Trondheim presents as alive and robust. The venues are packed. Besides Fjordgata, there’s the record stores-slash-labels Crispin Glover and All Good Clean Records. There’s a music magazine based here called Hook. MNJ Records releases the work of the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra. I’m repeatedly reminded that there are so many recording studios in town – like, so many. And many of Oslo’s hottest bands are comprised of musicians who studied in Trondheim or grew up here, including the best-known Norwegian band among UK audiences: Pom Poko.

Another sticking point is that enjoying a full-time music career in Norway is dependent on state funding. Locals fall in two camps when discussing the future of this. The more pessimistic – or maybe realistic – ones tell me that Norway is ten years behind the UK in terms of cuts to arts funding and other austerity measures. Others wave off such concerns: Norway is such a vastly different country to the UK, it’s not worth comparing.

For now – as has long been the case – venues in Norway can apply for grants of around £100,000 at a time. Artists can get thousands of pounds to procure professional equipment or see them through nationwide tours. It’s common sense that these investments in the economy and the culture are priceless. As Sara Fjeldvær evidences, in Norway, you can make a living as a full-time musician without having to leave your hometown.

For now at least. Norway’s far right party – Progress Party or Fremskrittspartiet – did terrifyingly well at the last election, and the just-left-of-centre government in power is itself shifting resources away from the arts. I can’t help but wonder if, without these top-down boosts, the dozen or so venues in town can survive between the transient student population and the vested, mustachioed, 60-year-old rockers (this is the composite of a typical Trondheimer according to Sara Fjeldvær). Since I was last in town a year ago, a 2-in-1 concert stage and basement venue called Lokal closed its doors.

I meet up with Rémy Malchère Pettersen and Anita Antal from the band Sundowning – not to be confused with the German metal band of same name – to get their perspective on the Norwegian music scene more widely. They’re from Oslo. They’re also the band from the lineup that stole my heart like no other, with brass-ornated, richly harmonised pop epics that elude comparison. “In Norway we’ve had really good state funding programmes for culture and I feel like every politician now is like, that’s not that important,” Remy tells me before their soundcheck in the Tyven venue – a bustling cafe/bar hybrid with chunky sofas, local zines propped on shelves, and a pop-up kebab shack out back.

Many acts from Scandinavia are torn between shooting for the anglosphere and committing to home. “A typical run for a Norwegian band doing English lyrics and wanting to play outside of Scandinavia is you do that for maybe four-five years,” Remy continues. “You play tours that take all your money and you have to sleep in shitty places, and it’s fun, but you’re not making a living. Then you come back to Norway and it’s like, we should just play for a Norwegian audience and forget the whole international thing, because there are enough festivals and enough state funds for now. There’s enough money to go on in Scandinavia, to make your living just doing it here.”

What concerns Remy’s writing partner, Anita – Sundowning’s captivating, chameleonic lead vocalist – is that there simply aren’t enough people in Norway to sustain the kind of underground scenes that thrive without government support in the UK and Germany. “There’s not a lot of people, so if you’re doing an underground special niche – say, experimental jazz – here at least you get funding, but there’s not that many people so the underground here is much smaller,” she says. “The scary thing is that if you only get funding here and not actually an audience, then at some point people are gonna think it’s not important and the funding will disappear.”

That’s partly why an event such as Trondheim Calling is so crucial. Since 2011, the festival has been quietly orchestrating a programme of the best rising artists from Norway and its neighbours – a reliable cornerstone of the nation’s music scene that allows you to explore big questions and/or embrace music that moves you, or grounds you. As for the bands, they get an audience of ‘delegates’ who wield relative clout and connections, as well as local (and some less-local) music fans who can help with word-of-mouth promo, and maybe pick up a record or a t-shirt meanwhile.

Unlike many European showcase festivals, Trondheim Calling keeps its focus on home, not extending arms too far across Europe. There are a handful of acts from Denmark and Sweden this year, but Norway is drowning in forward-thinking talent from its back garden. I can understand how the bookers might stuff the lineup to capacity before they’ve had a chance to consider anyone from further afield. Many other, much larger showcase festivals have a mission to unite the continent, but that mission must start at home; Trondheim Calling is no less important.

Anita and Remy aren’t sure where their band Sundowning goes from here. They’ve played fewer than ten gigs as a full band (and only a handful as a duo). They recount the low-stakes environment the project was born from: a fun-first studio jam session one day in autumn 2023. They accidentally wrote a song. Then they accidentally wrote some more. Then Anita cc’d some peers from the Norwegian Music Academy in Oslo.

“I wanted to make a good album,” Remy remembers. “It doesn’t have to come out. People don’t have to listen to it. We just have to make one good album. The whole process of making Sundowning has been going to the studio and asking, ‘What are we gonna do today? Don’t know – let’s make some melodies and build from that and not have set rules on what it’s gonna sound like.’”

When I press the duo for their mood-board of influences – hoping they corroborate my hodgepodge list that includes Fleetwood Mac, Sufjan Stevens at his most big-band, ABBA, and Big Thief at their most playful – they’re fairly stumped. For the last nine years, Remy has drummed in a yelly, riffy rock band called brenn. Anita grew up singing Etta James, Chaka Khan, and Hungarian folk – but walks that back because maybe those influences aren’t present in Sundowning. Their bassist, Axel Hasle Ytreberg, is deft at shifting the vibe of a chord progression through the atypical root notes she leans into. And guitarist Benjamin Rø Haavelsrud is “the king of snacks,” Anita says, making “tasty, yummy things on the guitar” – but he’s not a jazz guitarist, though he does study at a jazz school…

The resulting songs are unabashedly euphoric, astoundingly uplifting, and recall history’s most dexterous, highly skilled pop arrangers. Listen to the clever chord substitutions in “Horses” or “Joe Anna”, the masterful command of tension and release – of song structure. Anita’s flute twirls around Eira Elise Øverås’s stirring trumpet countermelodies. The five-part vocal harmonies send you up to the Aurora. These songs can carry so much on their shoulders – can wipe away anxious future-gazing and plant you in the moment. Sundowning has no idea how good they are.

This play on and don’t overthink the end goal attitude is a great antidote to existential concerns surrounding the future of the arts in Norway. Reolô are more literal and blunt: “No one can stop the dance,” the five members chant together in Norwegian. It’s amusing to see throngs of students oblige, swing-dancing in trad-folk’s version of a mosh while this band of older dudes plays swampy, downtempo, psychy tunes anchored by non-Western harmonic influences and Velvet Underground clamour. It’s incongruous – an incredible, entrancing racket with lightning-fast violin scrubbing and incanted call-and-response vocals.

Reolô are one of the de facto headliners on the democratically structured bill – a big draw in the Olavshallen complex, home to the symphony orchestra, the Crispin Glover record store, and the NTNU music university. Reolô are also part of an exciting boom of traditional folk music: acts that sing in Norwegian and marry traditional instruments and melodic ideas with more contemporary or pop-adjacent ingredients. It could be punk, maybe dance, some rap – there are no rules, really. But these reinterpretations of bygone songcraft have dominated the pop scene over the last five years, Sara Fjeldvær tells me. “It’s our history and our roots coming back.”

Many people point to an Oslo trio called Valkyrien Allstars as having opened the gates here. The brilliant band Pumpegris, who we profiled after their Trondheim Calling set last year, followed their lead. This year, the big one for me in this lane is Diket and their skulking, after-dark allure. Fragmented, ostinato-based grooves reminiscent of Stereolab and Tortoise are cloaked in the fairytale mystery of the kantele, a type of boxed zither instrument that, in Finnish mythology, is said to draw all the forest creatures near to wonder at its beauty. That’s pretty much what happens in the packed-out Ulven venue. Vocalist Levina Storåkern delivers her benevolent, lilting hums in Norwegian. The subject matter includes “killer slugs” and “where the onion grows” – songs from their aptly titled 2024 EP Och sen kom vintern (And then winter came).

Rigla, meaning wobbly, is another highly educated folk-jazz group with similar DNA and levels of buzz around them. For the first 25 minutes of their 30-minute set, I queue outside the overflowing Moskus venue in the 14-below chill before admitting defeat. On the smaller of two opposite stages at the Byscenen venue, Edvard Kildahl leads his band of string players in rustic, transportive, countryside-evoking songs, like Nick Drake orchestrated by a gang of rural Nordic players from the 19th century. Kildahl describes himself as a “Norwegian songwriter who writes songs in Norwegian.”

The theme of commitment runs through Trondheim Calling this year. I witness artists committing to their hometown, to their country, to tradition, to themselves – in some cases to all of the above.

For Edvard Kildahl, Norway – his Norwegianness – is a worthy lede. He leans into it, celebrates it.

Sundowning never tried to ape ABBA’s first-bitingly gorgeous harmonic surprises; “I guess you just have to sing whatever comes,” Anita says. “I started to doubt whether I actually have a sound, but then I’ve heard that there is something there.” (There is.)

Experimental composer Live Hanken commits to herself. Her set is all about the power of the self. She live-loops her voice, enabling her to self-harmonise. It creates these immersive one-woman soundscapes in which her finger-picked guitar clusters glide like there’s butter on the fretboard while a harmonica note drones and she builds layers of her magical, cooing vocals.

And as for Sara Fjeldvær, she tells me that what inspires her is, “unfortunately, the world.” She’s committed to knowing what’s going on, to feeling and commiserating, having wept to Springsteen’s new anti-ICE song on her way in this morning. “I care too much about being up to date, although it really hurts, so I write a lot of love songs. I care a lot about love and people. It’s my life.”

Trondheim Calling suggests that it’s healthy, prudent, necessary to reduce the scope – to create for yourself, for love, to look at what’s around you, to stay home. Or to come back. “I wish I could do more for everyone,” Sara goes on. “You have to just do one thing that’s really good. And it’s nice, since you’re here, to write about Trondheim.”