Late last year, director André Løyning presented his documentary on Årabrot called Cocks & Crosses – The Music That Didn’t Want To Die at the Trondheim Documentary Festival.
After that screening, the band’s frontman Kjetil Nernes teamed up with Swedish-Norwegian singer-songwriter Karin Park in a collaboration they billed as Årabrot Speciale with the set coming in at 40 minutes in total. They were also specially joined for this set by viiolinist Ola Kvernberg. You can now watch a recording of that set in full above.
Over the course of the set, the pair work with drone-like textures, somewhat subduing the all-out attack of the full band set-up from Årabrot, who were responsible for our favourite album of 2016 in The Gospel, with Kvernberg’s violin further revealing a fine beauty hidden in the band’s work.
"I was editing my film from a hotel room in Molde, Norway while filming daily concerts with Ola Kvernberg as a festival’s Artist in Residence," says Løyning. "I was also playing his compositions in the car driving from Oslo, Norway to Djura, Sweden. When we got to screen the documentary at the festival in Trondheim, where Ola lives and is official city artist, I wanted to hook them up, so this concert is like the final ending of a year in chaos of filmmaking – my debut as director at the largest film festival in Norway, and travelling with Ola. What a blast!"
Cocks & Crosses – The Music That Didn’t Want To Die is billed as "a film about life, death and Årabrot." The documentary was premiered on August 20 of last year at the Norwegian International Film Festival, and follows the band in recent years in the wake of frontman Kjetil Nernes’ tongue cancer diagnosis in 2014. He has since received the all-clear. London screenings of the documentary are hopefully expected to follow this year. You can read our 2016 interview with Kjetil Nernes here.
