Andrew 'bAyA' Murray is a producer, songwriter, engineer and mixer based in Oslo, Norway.

Andrew bAyA Murray

Norwegian singer-songwriter Margrete announces her 4-track debut EP ‘Flaws Vol 1’, out 9 December via independent imprint New Phase. The announcement is paired with the release of her latest single ‘Silverless Skies’, out 22 November on streaming platforms. 

Rising star Margrete announces her debut EP ‘Flaws Vol 1’, a project almost entirely self-produced by the young Scandinavian artist. An introspective body of work that explores the complex emotions of youth, the artist challenges imposter syndrome, breaking down barriers and discovering herself as an artist and producer. The artist has created something truly unique as she touches on various transitional periods in her life to create her most honest piece of work to date. 

FLAWS vol. 1

 as "a tiny record marking my coming of age as a musician". It's both a small, tongue-in-cheek statement and a huge one; in that way, it mirrors her songwriting, where seismic and serious details are woven into grunge-pop melodies that feel light and breezy. Like any good coming-of-age story, 

 is filled with angst, joy, romance, and of course, anthemic choruses. "It's a conscious first step into the sonic world of adulthood," says Ayka, never far from laughter. "Yeah, I’d like to try making music, like, 

Eleven

 album, Sea Change has been a platform for singer and producer Ellen A. W. Sunde to remould the electronic genre into unique new shapes. Now unveiling her third studio album, 

, the Norwegian artist has crafted her most intimate and hypnotic body of work to date.

There’s a cohesive flow across the nine tracks that makes the whole record play out with a cinematic slow-burn quality, while Sunde chooses the perfect moment to lean into more intense grooves and beats. The thumping bass underpins shimmering melodies that sound like a shoegaze-informed strain of EDM. Amid all of this is her echoing vocals, which murmur like an apparition, bringing to mind artists such as Smerz, 

. It’s easy to get lost in the flow of songs like ‘Never Felt’ and ‘Night Eyes’ as they dissolve the threshold between melancholic and blissful into one single mood. By the time ‘Rituals’ closes the record, you feel as if you’ve been lulled into a nocturnal trance that you hope won’t end.

Mutual Dreaming 

 is an artwork by Pedro Gómez-Egaña at the Oslo public library 

.

Inmeridiem centres on a single stone taken from Akerselva river, and brought into the Oslo public library, a site whose purpose is the assemblage of knowledge. Inmeridiem investigates the library’s relation to the river, as well as our own relation to bodies and things. The artwork invites one viewer per day to be with the stone for 10 minutes. The experience includes kinetics, music, and text.

The artwork can be visited by one person per day, and is experienced at the exact moment between sunrise and sunset. Use the "book your spot" button to book your spot.

Spots are released throughout the year. If you don’t find a spot available, please try again on another day.

Inmeridiem

Luft inviterer en håndfull av Norges råeste artister til vårt studio og tar et dypdykk i deres komposisjoner, arbeidsprosesser og musikkproduksjoner. Gjennom 4 direktesendte episoder frem mot jul, popper vi panseret på noen av deres beste låter.

Poppa Panseret S2

It was when dropping out of a “liberal but fully capitalistic millennial pastel palette media-degree”, that Ayka shifted her focus towards music. The Norwegian songwriter had till then been in a handful of various creative projects - dabbling with sound, art and text. Despite this, the local and “laissez-faire” art school wasn’t a fit either, and it was inevitable something had to change. I’ll Show Myself Out Now isn’t just her debut EP; it represents a document of the artist re-focusing how and what she wants to create and communicate.

 I'll Show Myself Out Now

Sassy 009 releases her mixtape Heart Ego via Oslo-based label Luft Recordings. With praise so far from the likes of Pitchfork, NME, Crack Magazine, i-D, and more, the mixtape features standout tracks “

Heart Ego

Winner of the Norwegian Film Critic's Award at the Norwegian Film Festival 2021.

Jury statement: In a poetic and credible way, this year’s winner hits our contemporary culture on the spot, as it thematizes grief and young, female solitude. Without getting too obvious, the story develops with multiple layers and sticks with us. The camera focuses on the female main character, that is played with an unusual authenticity and sensibility – a first class acting effort. By the art of suggestion tragedy and hope are drawn up for us. Through a meeting with another outsider, the main character can glimpse the summer light again.

Sofia

 ser nærmere på fremstillinger og forståelser av kvinneskikkelsen i populærkulturen, og hvilket mulighetsrom som finnes i en annerledes utøvelse av, og blikk på femininitet. Forestillingen navigerer gjennom referanser fra jazzdans, kommersiell dans og populærkultur i forhandlinger mellom kropp og kjønn, objektet og subjektet, den som gjør og den som ser. I forhandlingen, i mellomrommet, i feilkoblingen skapes et frirom der det legges nye premisser for blikket, forståelsen og opplevelsen av femininitet.

Meta Sexy

Known for playing keys in Sassy 009’s band, Sunniva Mellbye - aka 

 - has announced her new solo EP ‘Behind Your Back’, sharing first single ‘For You, Baby’ to celebrate.

“‘For You, Baby’ is the inner voice of someone doing her utmost to seduce her object of desire. Promises of experience and love are cried out in a moment of desperation,” says Sunniva. “Looking at contemporary romance, I struggle to grasp what go though people’s minds. While writing these songs, I dissected my own experiences, trying to understand.”

Behind Your Back

Already a two-time alum of Short of the Week – with her films 

 – Norwegian filmmaker Thea Hvistendahl returns to our site with 

a thought-provoking exploration of a female experience not often seen on screen. It may be 2021, but there are many topics not widely discussed among women, including what it actually feels like to have an abortion, let alone the mental trauma that comes along with it. Colorful and deeply personal, 

 is an eye-opening film that will offer a much-needed perspective into the female psyche.

Winner Of Gnist Prize at The Norwegian Short Film Festival 2020, Honorable Mention at 

Kristiansand International Children’s Film Festival 2021

 is a film we’re proud to premiere on S/W. Hvistendahl is currently working on her debut feature, 

Cramps

PAN-AL delves into music production via his sparse bedroom set up with a primarily meditative purpose, intentionally losing track of time, thoughts and reality whilst turning knobs and programming exaggeratedly long automation sections with microscopic changes. What comes out on the other side of the DAW is lush, ethereal and ebbing electronica tapping into ambient, breakbeat and IDM influences.

No Mind

Oslo-based Jouska are the musical and artistic partnership of Marit Othilie Thorvik and Hans Olav Settem. Taking influence from the likes of The Internet, Grimes and contemporaries Sassy 009, their brand of bedroom RnB encourages the listener to explore the furthest reaches of the emotional spectrum. Their debut album 

 is an introvert’s playground, exploring teenage isolation and heartbreak. In places overtly on tracks like ‘Because I Really Don’t Mind’, which Marit tells us is about “feeling like an alien in a person suit. Sometimes it feels like everyone else in the world is a collective group of beings who form a community of which I’m not a part of.” With the warm crackle of a vinyl record, the album’s sound has heart while using distorted elements to tell its story. Juxtaposing sensitivity with purposefully jarring sensory overload, half-whispered vocals are paired with pounding, industrial beats and drops. As well as reaching out into the fantastical, the album also portrays the mundane reality of life with depression. Being manipulated by toxic people alongside the pitfall of falling too deep into destructive cycle of self-pity. The title track elaborates on this – it’s “a portrayal of depression. It’s about waking up with the same draining anxiety in your body, disappointed that sleep didn’t cure you this time either.

Everything Is Good

Charlotte Dos Santos comes into her own with beautiful new single 'Helio'.

The gilded new project is a hyper-sensual affair, with the languid, spacious arrangement augmented by supple strings.

An old-fashioned bop delivered in a slightly Baroque context, the single is an ode to self-love, about "the power we hold within ourselves and the fact that we truly only need ourselves to be happy…"

Helio (SASSY 009 Remix)

"SASSY 009 on Radio 1! That thing is called 'Ghost Town', proper wobbly that thing isn't it, gets me all weak at the knees"

Ghost Town - Spotify Studio Oyster Recordig

Luft inviterer en håndfull av Norges råeste artister til vårt studio og tar et dypdykk i deres komposisjoner, arbeidsprosesser og musikkproduksjoner. Gjennom 4 direktesendte episoder frem mot jul, popper vi panseret på noen av deres beste låter. Sassy 009, Pen Gutt, Samkoph & Olefonken (Hubbabubbaklubb)

Poppa panseret S1

PAN-AL's music is based around the core wash of ethereal synth pads and plangent synth melodies, bolstered by tastefully glitching beats that call to mind Selected Ambient Works dreamy rave atmosphere: "Combining light and soft synths with more intense beats adds contrast and interesting dynamics," Thorstvedt enthuses. "There's an androgynous character to it all."

Pan-Al

SASSY 009 is Sunniva Lindgård.
KILL SASSY 009 is written and performed by Sunniva Lindgård.

Produced & mixed by SASSY 009 & BAYA winter & spring 2019 in Studio A at Luft Studios.

Featured instruments: Logic X & presents, Juno 106, OB6, Arp2600, Culture Vulture, Tore Seem, U87, Drumbrute, UA Apollo, Tip Top HH 909 Module, Fender P-bass & Strat.

Additional performances and writing by Andrew Murray.
Mastered by Beau Thomas.

KILL SASSY 009

Sea Change established a mix of ethereal introverted synth-pop, combining shimmery synths, electronic beats and intimate vocals in her 2015 album debut Breakage.
Her follow up album 'INSIDE', made after relocating to Berlin, takes us to bolder and trippier soundscapes. Gone are the bright and wide open spaces, swapped for the dark, mysterious, often claustrophobic realms of the city.

Inside

You think of rappers and more often than not you think of swagger; a certain bravado and spectacle that oozes confidence and self-belief both in their personalities and their music. Rarely do you encounter someone who was a “complete nerd”, cripplingly shy and grew up in a nature-immersed town in Norway whilst going to Christian summer camp each year. However, this is one of many reasons that makes 24 year-old Pen Gutt such an original an artist.

As a result of an upbringing atypical to most rappers, Pen Gutt’s music is similarly atypical – existing in its own unique world in terms of tone, groove, flow and production. This Norwegian language music is even something the creator struggles to define himself. “I usually say it's a mixture of rap and folk music,” he says. “But the thing about genres is that as an artist I find it claustrophobic to work in a set of rules.”

The project combines the musical tastes of Pen Gutt along with his producer Samkopf, - “everything from Death Grips to Aphex Twin to 1950 Scandinavian musicals to Jpegmafia to Charlotte dos Santos” - and also owes a great deal to the Japenese anime series “Neon Genesis Evangelion”. Whilst you’ll need to speak Norwegian to understand the lyrics, they come from a period of real soul searching and when the character of Pen Gutt was created. “In my subconscious I think I had the idea of the whole album before I even started making it,” he says. “I’ve been a musician, model, actor and visual body performer and Pen Gutt is a character combined of all these professions and hobbies I've had until now. That's the reason why I really love music, because I get to combine everything I already love, and morph it into one project. The character is based on my experiences, but put in another universe. The same concepts and natural laws don’t apply to this universe. I like over-exaggerating situations and thoughts to make you feel something, rather than having it to be realistic.”

The album is also an exploration of death that came from Pen Gutt’s delve into philosophy. Reading works such as “Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Fear of Death”. This concept has been weaved into the album he says. “To stare at the sun simply means to face death head on and let your fears become a part of you. You realise that you can't escape death, but you can learn to live side by side with it.” However, whilst philosophy and long hours spent thinking about the meaning of life have informed this album, so to has the much more physical experience of death in his life. “Late last year I lost somebody really close, and it hit me like a train. I had never in my life experienced this much pain,” he says. And when he did begin to return to normal he found that “The darkness had become a part of me.”

In many ways, despite the shimmering melodies, infectious grooves, unshakable hooks and silk-smooth flows, the album is an extension of Pen Gutt’s soul searching and he hopes that the final result may help others along the way too. “I hope I can help some people to get through their problems. All those days and nights I’ve listened to songs that have made me feel like I’m not alone in my struggles, to realise that somebody else is also going through some shit, those moments are the realest.”

HOLD DEG I VARMEN

The propulsive Norwegian punk band that is Hudkreft have been active for five years. After hard work, loads of shows and smaller releases, the debut album is finally coming. Nevemagnet (translation: Fist Magnet) is Hudkreft's experimental entrance into adulthood and the music industry, that they are navigating with the youthful freshness that has always been present, now combined with a new professionalism.

luksusproblemer

"Independent" showcases Pen Gutt's double-time flow over a bubbling beat. He raps mainly in his native tongue, with the only decipherable English being "Fuck it." The track is out now via Luft Recordings and Terrible Records.

Independent

People were saying that Norwegian fjordmakossa had died and gone sterile. But the late, great ethnomusicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax begged to differ. In his famous field study report on the subject he wrote:” After days with nothing other to show for than wet clothes and an itchy crotch, I heard a sound echoing from the hills. It sounded like a herd of drunken zebras, or was it a cross between a flamenco and a monkey (a Fonkey?). I later discovered this nocturnal specie to be the band hubbabubbaklubb. A magical lantern in an endangered genre we all knew and loved as fjordmakossa, with an extraordinary expression that have later allowed them to successfully populate a diverse range of habitats – from deserts to islands to tropical forests.”

Tomme Lommer

Jula 2017 ønsket den nettbaserte matbutikken Kolonial.no å snike seg mellom julefilmene med en litt utradisjonell reklame for en dagligvarebutikk.

- På tide å plante et flagg i bakken og vise litt muskler. Dette er en ganske annerledes reklamefilm for en matbutikk, for vi er en ganske annerledes matbutikk, sier gründer og markedssjef Mats André Kristiansen.

Den nye reklamefilmen er laget i samarbeid med reklamebyrået Anorak og produksjonsselskapet Bacon.

Kolonial AD

The Power To Create

 have a fraught relationship with romance. The Norwegian electro-pop trio—Sunniva Lindgaard, Teodora Georgijevic, and Johanna Scheie Orellana, friends based in Oslo—demonstrates as much throughout 

, the group’s ethereal, often melancholic debut EP. They sing of being smitten and they sing of being hurt. They lament their suffering at the hands of a callous lover, then insist it’s all right; they urge someone close out the door, then two songs later agonize at the thought that he might leave. Joe Strummer wanted to know if he should stay or if he should go. Sassy 009 seem displeased with either option.

Do You Mind EP

His debut, "Oslo-Harlem" is a very personal body of music, interspersed with recordings from the artist’s own interviews with his formerly estranged father, Bruno Baya Sompohi. The journey of their first meeting in Harlem, meant the foregoing of a traditional paternal relationship. The recognition of their shared artistic spirit provided the impetus behind BAYA. His father's artwork derives from the interaction between the traditional masks of his sub-Saharan African homeland and the architecture of Western religion, dubbed "Glalogy". It is a theme BAYA brings forward in the visual elements of his own work.

Through "Oslo-Harlem", BAYA manages to connect the missing dots between an artist and what made him who he is.

Oslo - Harlem

MERCEDES-BENZ A CLASS AD

"By threading the charms of funk, soul, yacht, disco and slow jam onto the glittering strands of a ten track bracelet, Lovespeake have crafted the most perfect lip-smacking a la carte to both whet and satiate the most voracious of musical appetites."

Warpaint's 'Biggy' remixed by Baardsen, from the album 'Warpaint' out now.

Biggy (Baardsen Remix)

From Nowhere (Baardsen Remix)

 come over all gushing when talking about 

and it’s not surprising. The band gave one of the best live performances at The Great Escape 2013 (with a 

 to boot) and have consistently brought a rock sensibility to infectious indie-pop anthems.

 serves only to heighten our enthusiasm for one of Norway’s finest exports. Sharp, angular guitars are punctuated with throw-back synths, with the whole thing giving way to an earworm of a chorus that you’ll no doubt hear over and over on the station in the coming weeks. You can thank us then, or take a listen right now.

88 EP

 is currently enjoying the victory lap for her album

. To celebrate it being dubbed "album of the year" by

 two exclusive bonus discs for each of those shops featuring rare and unreleased material.

The Rough Trade disc features three tracks recorded around the same time as the album: "Ambrosia", the Jay Worthy-featuring track "Christmas Song", and the Majical Cloudz collaboration "Song for Ric" (which was previously included on

). It also features remixes of "Genesis" and "Be a Body". Grab it

The Resident disc features two rarities, "Angel" and "Life After Death", plus remixes of "Oblivion" and "Be a Body". Grab it

Be A Body (Baardsen Remix)

Released by 4AD on a exclusive Rough Trade bonus disc 2012

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/records/n2hd6x

http://earmilk.com/2012/04/27/grimes-oblivion-baardsen-remix/

Oblivion (Baardsen Remix)

Released by Heavenly on the 7” Genevieve Single summer 2012

Geneveieve (Baardsen Remix) 

 5 weeks Playlisted on BBC 1 “In New Music We Trust”, Rob da Bank’s Record of the week - BBC 1, XFM’s Hot One

First released on Rough Trade autumn 2010

Re-released on Rough Trade as the only bonus track on Warpaint’s exclusive reissue of “The Fool” 2011

Shadows (Neon Lights Remix)

Recorded and produced by Joe Wills, this is moody, fragmented R&B which retains a sense of mystery. Ahead of its release, Clash have been handed a new remix by reclusive producer Baardsen.

Becoming a blog favourite for his Grimes re-work last year, Baardsen pieces apart 'All We Are' to craft this cough syrup flavoured remix. All knackered beats and yawning vocals, you can listen to it below.

Andrew bAyA Murray

List

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Grid

Margrete

FLAWS vol. 1

EP

2022

Mix

Ayka

Eleven

EP

2022

Production

A&R

Writing

Mix

Studio Engineer

Sea Change

Mutual Dreaming

Album

2022

Mix

Pedro Gómez-Egaña

Inmeridiem

Art Installation

2022

Mix

Studio Engineer

Various

Poppa Panseret S2

TV Show

2021

Host!

Ayka

I'll Show Myself Out Now

EP

2021

Mix

Production

A&R

Writing

Studio Engineer

Sassy 009

Heart Ego

Mixtape

2021

Mix

Production

Writing

A&R

Studio Engineer

Eivind Landsvik

Sofia

Shortfilm

2021

Bespoke

Inés Belli // Sassy 009

Meta Sexy

Dance

2020

Mix

Murmur

Behind Your Back

EP

2020

Mix

Thea Hvistendal

Cramps

Shortfilm

2020

Mix

Production

Pan-Al

No Mind

Album

2020

Mix

Jouska

Everything Is Good