Outside the new museum, September 27th

Magne, along with Jonas Bjerre and Martin Terefe, attended the official opening of the new Astrup Fearnley museum in Oslo today. There’s a photo gallery from the event at vg.no.

Afterwards, they were guests on the radio programme Kulturnytt on NRK P2, to talk about their first impressions of the museum and the upcoming Apparatjik performance there on Saturday.

Magne was asked how the Apparatjik concept will fit in at the Astrup Fearnley museum:

“I don’t think it fits at all, because we’ve made it a specialty to fall between two stools. Most people in the art world think we’re way too pop-oriented. And those expecting to hear pop music think we’re too arty. So we have ended up somewhere in between, where we don’t manage to connect with anyone. But we do create music that we like, and the songs are quite structured. We’re not attempting to create very inaccessible stuff. We just don’t want to do things the way we’ve used to in our main projects.

We were shocked when we entered the stage at Roskilde this summer and looked out on an audience of 40.000 – 50.000 people, who stood with their jaws dropped for the first 15 minutes and then ended up jumping up and down to music they had never heard before. It was very exciting. I had never entered the stage before, without having at least a few hits to get the audience going. So it was incredibly fun. I think people with a certain sense of humour will feel this is something they should witness. And it takes place on Saturday at 9:00 PM”, Magne said.

“It’s important to stress that this is not a concert for the elite, but a free concert for the people of Oslo – and anyone who comes from out of town. We’re going to create a lot of noise, so this is not a part of those posh opening ceremonies”, he added.

The whole interview is available as an MP3 file at nrk.no.

Tonight, Apparatjik and Lowell did a “secret” warm-up show at DogA – the Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture in Oslo. A few pictures were posted on Instagram by Monika and Tini from The Voice.

Be also sure to check out a couple of new videos from the Roskilde concert on Vimeo, here and here.