Silje Nes

We first became aware of Norwegian multi-instrumentalist / singer / songwriter Silje Nes through a unique and charming demo she sent us in early 2006. Silje grew up on a tiny town called Leikanger, in Sognefjord, the largest fjord in Norway. In 2000, she moved to the rainy town of Bergen - where she still lives – to study philosophy and then visual communication. Silje has previously played in an indie pop band, and other highlights from a diverse musical background include playing timpani in an orchestra and bass drum in a marching band.

Starting making her own music around 2001, Silje began by recording on 4-track demo software through a tiny inbuilt microphone on her laptop. Though she’d previously studied classical piano, when she started recording, she did so with guitars and instruments she had no previous experience of playing. In this she was simply guided by the sounds she loved, and the excitement of discovering new instruments and sounds without learned conventions.

Starting out by working purely instrumentally, Silje made use of whatever equipment she could get hold of - guitars and an old synth, a cello, a drum kit, a laptop, as well as loop pedals to build layers of her own playing. Little by little she also found ways of including her own voice in the mix, both as texture and song, and her music has organically evolved from there. Although she made a successful live debut outside of Norway with a set at FatCat’s ‘Open Circuit’ festival in Belgium in early 2007, during this period Silje had only played her songs for very few people locally. Her first album for FatCat, the quirky, adventurous 'Ames Room', was released in December 2007. Whilst creating a sound-world entirely her own, the record shows a similar single-mindedness and (autodidactic) adventurousness to fellow peers like Tujiko Noriko, Islaja, Lau Nau, Eglantine Gouzy, Foehn, or Leila Arab, also sharing something of the homespun, sprawling beauty of the likes of The Pastels, Pram, or Crescent. Beautifully pieced together, tracks unfurl like a series of intricate constructions, or like some kind of strange blown-up world of insects or curious creatures - the whole teeming with life and a great sense of fun.

A digital-only EP, 'Yellow' followed in March 2008, featuring three exclusive, previously unreleased tracks, all created in the same period as the album. Silje then toured the UK and Ireland in May and played dates in Norway and Berlin over the summer.

Silje Nes is currently in the studio recording a new album which will be out in 2010.