Ketil Bjørnstad - Nightwalker (2023) Hi-Res

"A night walker can have a whole life in his head as he walks. This suite is built on both dreams and experiences, states of mind that we all have, with their abrupt changes, and often with a dramaturgy we do not understand, until we can only understand in retrospect what happened, and why things turned out the way they did. The entire suite was written during the winter, spring and summer of 2022, the dark year that none of us had foreseen.

Even before we moved to Frogner Plass in 1967, I had liked going out at night. Especially in autumn, when the wind blew and the leaves fell from the trees, but also in the winter night, spring night and summer night, often in Oslo's streets, or near a cabin at Eftang, a coastal paradise between Sandefjord and Larvik, where a young girl who interested me very vacationed with his family. Knut Hamsun wrote the novel Svermere, and I myself was probably, like now, a swarmer who absorbed all impressions from nature, where I went by myself and thought thoughts that I could not fully understand myself. The music was also always a companion. When Frogner Park became my closest neighbor in 1967 and in the years to come, I walked between Gustav Vigeland's sculptures up to the Monolith, the park's highest point, where human bodies carved in stone crawl up, up; a further development of Edvard Munch's Menneskeberget, which Munch disliked that his colleague copied. But there, at the top of the park, I had a view of the city, the Uranienborg spire and the Ekebergåsen. I could see out the fjord to Nesodden and follow the lights from the last planes to land at Fornebu, the old and atmospheric airport that had the runway right out into the water. What was I doing up there at the vantage point, often all alone? Just a lone night wanderer.

I often dream that I still walk at night, but mostly in the landscape of music.

January 2023 came. The snow came. Catharina went out into our garden by the Bunnefjord and photographed the young blackbird that was sitting in the fruit tree and had not yet got a yellow bill. For me it was a greeting from the past, from Brahms, from Frogner plass and Frognerparken at the time. Blackbird singing in the dead of night.”

CD 2 on this release is the NIGHTWALKER suite played on the venerable and classic Fender Rhodes piano, sent through an equally classic Leslie which provides a ghostly intensity and a completely unique atmosphere - giving the suite a completely different vibe.