Concert Review Øyafestivalen 2024, Sezinando: Berlinando

Event: Al Jazeera Festival
sisinando
The tent
Audience approximately 7000

What's wrong with artists who start with K and allsang?

Kaizers, Karpe and Kristoffer Cezinando Karlsen all have audiences so committed and invested in every stress and syllable that they are a pleasure to listen to on their own.

Something particularly fascinating about the latter. Cisnando's latest albums have been a continued exploration of the boundaries of pop music, becoming more and more ritualistic and rhythm-based, with tendencies toward the twisted and difficult.

Sometimes they were so radically different from the “Skam” songs he first became familiar with that you shouldn't expect anyone to stick with them.

But they do. All of them.

The clue was an Øya tent filled to the brim about an hour earlier, presumably to protect themselves from Wednesday’s rain. A downpour that wasn’t a shock to those who had been to Bruce Springsteen’s concert in Bergen a few weeks earlier. It was enough for Jarvis Cocker to open Pulps at about the same time he was complaining about the rain.

It was enough that the raindrops echoed on the ceiling of the Circus.

You didn’t hear much of them after Cisinando took the stage. He was dressed almost identically to Casiokids singer Fredrik Vogsborg who had left the same stage an hour earlier in a white shirt and blue jeans. Cisinando expanded with a red arm glove on his right arm and a white shirt. He went straight into rave party mode.

No, Øyafestivalen is not the new Berghain. Far from it.

But from “Autostrada (Zen)” (which carries the tagline “I wear my GP-era sunglasses”) until I drop it halfway through with “Håper du har plass”, the tent is as Berlin-like as Tøyen.

Where the audience follows every word, as the main character asserts, acts, and dances.

In contrast to Øya's 2018 concert: it's fun, casual and at the same time eerily close.

Without becoming involuntarily comic. But one could go so far as to describe it as poetic.

On “Powder,” the 29-year-old connects to the camera with a microphone. A move that brings the audience closer to his facial expressions and looks. “The Blair Witch Project” and “Bono Anu 1991” share the same thing. It may sound banal and almost silly, but it’s wonderfully effective.

From the stage, not much is communicated other than some obligatory shouts of “Oslo”, a heartfelt thank you and a well-deserved introduction to the band.

It's also not necessary – although some of the transitions in the song, if you're going to be difficult, could have been tightened up. Once you settle on a strong techno line like this.

In conclusion, “Christopher Robin,” recently interpreted by Randy Olin, sings about a magnet losing its compass.

If this is the outcome, let's hope he doesn't find it again.