Geir Sundstøl and Erland Dahlen’s otherworldly Oslo blues

The weird blues whine of Geir Sundstøl’s pedal steel emanates from the stage, as his Bowie/Coltrane mash-up ‘Warszaw/Alabama’ translates Bowie’s Berlin Wall-confronting synth piece ‘Warszaw’ into swampier language, and sets it within ‘Alabama’, Coltrane’s song of spiritual outrage at the Klan’s murder of four black girls. He finds mournful yet inviting common ground in the notes’ slow, spreading bend and slur.

This was the signature track on Sundstøl’s breakthrough album Brodløs (2018), with its masterful adventures in the potential of pedal steel and associated gear. Drummer Erland Dahlen was credited with an encyclopaedic percussive array on that album. Both are signed to Hubro, Norway’s home for idiosyncratic soundscapes such as Dahlen’s brooding Bones (2020). Playing with Sundstøl tonight, he shows similar faith in his kit’s phantasmagoric range.

The Nasjonal Jazzscene lies behind a modest doorway off Oslo’s main drag, liable to sozzled revellers tipping into avant-garde soirees, but fully immersed in the city’s life. The packed crowd, skewed towards youth and hip-ly intent, embodies a jazz community so healthily close that, days later, Sundstøl will gig in his apartment block garage.

His freewheeling latest album, The Studio Intim Sessions Vol. 1, is inspired by the ship’s chest of records his seafaring uncle brought home in the 1970s, an exotic trove ranging from Jerry Lee Lewis to Lee Perry. Its pop tunes and reggae lope infuse tonight’s Norwegian dub-scapes.

Though Sundstøl wears the black waistcoat and shirt of a Greenwich Village folk-rocker, his gangling frame and spidery, Chelsea-booted legs make him an angular, awkward guitar hero. Dahlen sports a dragon-adorned kimono top, enthroned within an Aladdin’s cave of a kit. He’s as prone to tone poem colours as his partner, making a musical saw emit theremin-like moans. Leaving his pedal steel for what looks like a dobro – likely his related, Shankar guitar – Sundstøl switches to almost straight blues as Dahlen spreads a percussive field around him, scraping his snare like a shaker and tolling bells like we’re at sea, climaxing with a rumbling, rock monster drum solo.

Electric bassist Jo Berger Myhre has joined in by now, finding a gorgeous 1950s tone with just Sundstøl for company, and mystery and mood in the notes’ spreading resonance. A deeply atmospheric haze holds us suspended for a long, blissful spell. When it breaks, Sundstøl backs away from his effects pedal’s Geiger crackle as if scalded, then Dahlen’s chimes give bright, glinting colour.

By the encore, Sundstøl is sat back in pedal steel devotion, making the sound that found Bowie and Coltrane’s hearts with its slurs out of shape. Notes slide together again, as the air thickens.