Norway’s Orions Belte kicks off a 23-date U.S. tour at Los Angeles’ Lodge Room on Friday. The tour will take them to new territory, including the Midwest (and Minneapolis’ 7th Street Entry March 12).
Øyvind Blomstrøm, the psych trio’s guitarist, talked with Jam in the Stream editor Javier Serna recently via video chat, and the conversation was wide-ranging from discussion of the band’s tour, the band’s sound, what inspiration the natural world has on the band’s music, the way the band approaches writing instrumentals, how the band got its name and more.
Orions Belte has been around for about 10 years and has been touring the U.S. a bit in recent years, including two separate U.S. tours and, last year, played Austin Psych Fest and a few other shows in Texas.
Blomstrøm said that the brunt of band’s streaming-pull is from American-based listeners.
“Most of our audience is in the U.S.,” he said. “So it totally makes sense for us to play there.”
It’s different than playing in Norway or Europe.
“It is so much fun,” Blomstrøm said. “It’s like it’s own thing. And Europe is different as well. For me, I kind of realize more and more that the electric guitar is like an American invention, right? It’s always been with you guys, and for us, it’s always been copying American culture in a way. All the music, all the movies, everything we see. The things we grew up with, it’s basically our interpretation of your culture.”
There is something about playing for an audience that really, really loves music as much as Americans do in their unique way, he said. “People are really getting into it another kind of way than in a lot of other countries.”
Øyvind Blomstrøm plays guitar for Orions Belte. You can hear the intricacies of the 20-year relationship he’s had with the custom Telecaster-style guitar a friend made for him in the band’s sound. PHOTO BY NIKOLAI GRASAASEN
The band has never played the Midwest before and Nashville or Vancouver (though Blomstrøm has been to both). The band has never performed in Canada before.
Find the full tour details here. It ends in Philadelphia on March 23.
I asked how the band came up with its name. Orions Belt is a group of three stars in the constellation Orion, which is visible in the Northern Hemisphere.
Like most bands, he said, they struggled to come up with a name.
“We have that Nordic or colder influence, and we named a couple of songs after some stars,” he said.
Blomstrøm pointed to a 1985 Norwegian action thriller from 1985 of the same name that was filmed in the Svalbard Islands. It was actually filmed in both Norwegian and English.
“It has this amazing synthy soundtrack from the 80s,” he said. “We always used to watch that when I was little. We named one of the songs Orions Belte, and then our label guy, Erik, said, I don’t like your band name. I can’t remember what we were going to call the band. But he was like, you guys should just call yourselves Orions Belte. You’re three guys, and that is a great title.”
I asked what influence nature has on the band’s sound. Blomstrøm mentioned the remote live streams the band did from beautiful places around Norway during the pandemic. He pointed out that the country is sparsely populated outside the cities.
Norway’s beauty is tremendous. PHOTO BY JAVIER SERNA/@jaminthestream
“We have a lot of space, and we have so much mountains,” he said. “Basically, the whole middle of Norway is basically only mountains. … In Norway, there are so many mountains and all of the cities are kind of spread out across the coastline, where people can reach other parts of the world and fish, and all of those things. For us, it’s always kind of present. In Oslo, it’s one of the few capitals I know of where you can drive for 50 minutes and just go skiing for hours and hours, or you can walk down to the ocean and go swimming, or we do saunas that are on the water now, in the freezing winter. Dive in. So nature is always all around us.”
He grew up in a rural part of the country, with reindeer and elk everywhere, he said.
“It’s always there, and I think you can feel it in our music. Especially for our kind of music when we dive into the more psych rock world. It sounds more different because it is not German or Latin American. When a lot of Norwegian jazz bands play, a lot of people call it Nordic Jazz because it sounds more like the mountains or it has some weird inspiration, which is kind of like the cold climate in a way.”
During the pandemic, he said the band wanted to do something different than just recording and streaming from their living room or studio space.
“We rented some gear and just got some help,” he said. “People drove some gear. We had two Viking dudes carrying all of our stuff to the top of the mountain. And we played. We had a huge mountain. We had one friend who filmed the whole thing and he also did some drone stuff. And then we had our mixing engineer, Matias Tellez, a great human being and amazing producer and mixer, he joined us because he didn’t have anything else to do as well. ... It’s no overdubs, it’s only us playing out in the nature. That was an amazing experience. I love playing out in the woods because the sound is so good there. I would love to do that more.”
I could describe this band’s sound, but I gave Blomstrøm an opportunity to do that.
“Most of the time we try to explain it as instrumental music and then people can interpret it the way they want to because we have a lot of fans from different places, so some people would think we are very bluesy, and some people listen to us in the same way as they do a lot of psychedelic stuff, both new and old,” he said. “And there is a lot of indie pop in our sound. Especially the other two guys, they grew up in the indie era, playing in a lot of different bands in Bergen (Norway), part of the Bergen sound of the 2000s. So it’s kind of hard to explain because we also sing a lot. So, it’s rough labeling it as instrumental music, but we view ourselves as an instrumental band, even though we are singing because it’s not like verses and choruses. Most of the time it’s like a line or two, just in the background.”
The band’s uses of vocals like another instrument.
“That is basically what we are trying to bring with the vocals, just like an extra layer,” he said. “We are releasing a new album, or we have some singles coming up (The Carneddau, below, was just released). There will be an album coming up this year. There are some songs with a bit more vocals, but also some songs with only the three of us playing together. We kind of have a no-rule policy. So we try to set some framework for what we are trying to do and then we try to break it.”
They live by the one rule where parameters are meant to be crossed.
“We have a really strict thing where we try not to overthink anything,” he said. “So when we are recording, we can say up front we are not going to use any keyboards or we are not to do this and that and then the next thing you know we are standing there playing a lot of synths. We try to stay open to the idea of the song, or listen really carefully. We always record with bass, drums and guitar, and then we are feeling out what a song needs and just take it from there.”
The band does do a little bit of improvisation on certain songs, Blomstrøm said, but they will largely settle into a set list midway through the tour.
“When you get into the flow of a tour, you get into a certain ballpark of a setlist that you play every day,” he said. “But I like to keep it fresh every day. … We do have two or three songs that are open and have larger stretches that could last five or six minutes going to a certain place. Some of them are like old school psych rock and some of them are like krautrockish. It’s one beat played and I can float on top of that with the guitar.”
The band has experimented with a drum machine and synthesizers in a past tour, for one song, he said.
“I do really like the improv part of it,” he said. “Some songs are really strict, arranged and we play them the same every night. And some are open and anything can happen there.”
If you dig in on Orions Belte’s catalog, you will find that they do some really cool covers, and sometimes add different pieces or vocalists. You might find that the three members all cut their own albums under the Orions Belte name a while back.
“Most of the time when we do the basic tracks, it’s just the three of us or in the studio with an engineer,” Blomstrøm said. “But we have had a lot of different people joining in. Or like laying down some vocals afterwards and even done some writing with different people. We try to look at the band like how far can it stretch the description of being a band.”
The trio was the backing band for Øyafestivalen, one of the largest music festivals in Norway, during their 20th anniversary year. They played their first ever gig at the fest.
I wondered about the band’s influences.
“There is so much stuff,” Blomstrøm said. “We like each other’s music tastes, but we come from really different places. ... I’ve listened to a lot of old stuff, like really old, early, early blues guitar players from the 1920s and 30s and up to today. Ry Cooder, or whatever kind of slide guitar players and stuff like that. I also like country music. I also like jazz. I’ve listened to a lot of jazz with my father. I also found British rock, kind of like progressive stuff when I was in my teens, like Yes and King Crimson and that kind of shit … and I also like World music, like African guitar music and Indian music. … We have done a lot of hip hop covers. Chris (Holm), the bassist, grew up listening to a lot of hip-hop from the 90s. A lot of South American stuff, Brazilian music from the 60s and 70s. It is hard to pinpoint. Our music is super eclectic, like wandering around.”
The trio, including drummer Kim Åge Furuhaug, is all 40 years old (or about to turn 40) and have been playing music professionally for a few decades, Blomstrøm said.
I wondered if the band, so good at crafting instrumentals, had figured out a formula or ingredient that needs to be there to make a song work.
“I think we try to break that rule all of the time, but a lot of the time, it turns into like a practical thing,” he said. “Almost all of the songs are recorded with one guitar and one bass, like the same two instruments that we always use. That’s I guess a big part of the sound, kind of really concrete, my main guitar and Chris’ main bass. That is a big part of the sound. I always use the same strings, same slide and same effects also. I have just one fuzz box that I always use and a couple of delays. So it’s basically always the same set up. I think that is one of the things we try to do and also not being afraid to repeat stuff … even though it could sound under-arranged, it’s really nice to play the same riff over and over again and see what happens or if it makes small differences along the way. If there is a riff, a verse and a chorus, just kind of repeat that structure a couple of times and that’s the song. So a lot of times we try to keep it super, super simple and not overproduce in a way.
“So we don’t have one particular thing that always has to be there, but a lot of the times it’s come up with a small drum pattern, and I try to come up with a really, really simple melody and try to play the melody as pure as you can. It’s like searching for some authenticity, like trying to find something that feels real or grounded.”
There’s a lot of instrumental psych bands currently, but Orions Belte has a way of writing comforting compositions.
“It’s always a search,” he said. “You mention the song Bean; it’s like that. It’s a couple of tones. When that feels good, it’s like leave it there. Don’t try to bring in 1,000 chords, just like have two chords. … But I try to experiment with different techniques or mixing of effects or also where I pick in the strings and also like the use of the Bigsby Vibrato, just seeing how many sounds you can get.”
He’s been playing the same guitar for 20 years, a hand-made Telecaster-style guitar built by a friend of his, Pål Kristiansen.
“That is becoming a part of your DNA,” he said. “Like you know every single part and where the specific sound you can get, like if you dig back here you can get a certain cluck, or a certain squeak. You know every place on the guitar.”
While that may sound simple, you hear it in their sound, and Orions Belte definitely has fine-tuned the art of crafting emotive instrumentals.
