Posts Tagged ‘magne furuholmen’

Martin Terefe joins Magne on The Voice

Martin Terefe – Magne’s Apparatjik bandmate and longtime collaborator – appeared on The Voice last Friday as Magne’s handpicked assistant, as the contest moved onto the so-called battle phase.

Assistants to the three other mentors are American drummer David Heilman (Sondre), Barbadian singer Shontelle (Hanne) and Norwegian songwriter Thom Hell (Yosef).

The first two talents on Magne’s team to compete were Knut Anders Sørum and Marius Beck. Their performance of Keane’s “Bend and Break” can be seen at TV2.no.

The battle phase episodes, which were taped at the end of January, will continue for five more weeks. After that, it’s time for the live shows, which start on April 27th. Tickets for the live shows seem to be available now from Billettservice.

Magne portrayed in new book

Magne and twenty other Norwegians have been interviewed and photographed for an upcoming book called Rom 13, which will be published in April.

Oslo Red Cross and the new hotel The Thief, which opens at Tjuvholmen next year, are behind the book project. According to Dagbladet, the people portrayed in the book will talk about important choices they have made in their lives. The journalist Jonas Forsang has done the interviews.

In addition to the book, there will also be a photo exhibition. All the photos have been taken by Marcel Leliënhof in a specially made hotel room that has been set up at Tjuvholmen’s Shed 13 warehouse.

The proceeds will go to the Red Cross project Nettverk Etter Soning, which provides support for people who have been released from prison.

Morten appears in Stargate documentary

Morten made a small appearance in a new documentary about Stargate that aired on NRK1 in Norway last night.

But those of you now eager to hear Morten’s views on the Goa’uld System Lords or Samantha Carter’s theories on wormhole physics, will be disappointed.

The documentary was actually about the Norwegian producer duo Tor Erik Hermansen and Mikkel Eriksen, also known as Stargate. Based in New York, they have enjoyed big success in the US in recent years, becoming the first Norwegians to top the Billboard Hot 100 since a-ha. Stargate have written and produced such #1 hits as “Irreplaceable” (Beyoncé), “Firework” (Katy Perry), “Rude Boy”, “Only Girl (In the World)” and “S&M” (Rihanna) and “Black and Yellow” (Wiz Khalifa).

“When these guys manage to top that chart, which is the most difficult chart in the world to enter and which is based on airplay/sales statistics among an enormous amount of people – that’s like the ultimate achievement, in competition with everyone else”, Morten says in the documentary.

“They’ve done something formidable, which should be celebrated”, he added.

As some of you may remember though, Morten and Magne have made less favourable comments on Stargate in the past.

“Personally, this is not music that I’ll care to spend any time on. Success on its own doesn’t impress me, but if on the other hand you’re successfull with something good, that will really impress me”, Magne told VG in 2006.

“There’s one side of the music business that’s pure industry, and one side that’s more focused on the musical content, and then you find yourself situated somewhere between those two extremes. a-ha and Stargate aren’t exactly positioned in the same place on that scale”, Morten said in the same 2006 interview.

As for Paul; as a fellow New Yorker, he is a good friend of the guys in Stargate. The song “Shadowside” on Foot Of The Mountain was written specifically for one of Stargate’s artists. Eventually it ended up as an a-ha song instead.

“But without Stargate I wouldn’t have written that song. I’m looking for challenges like that, as I’ll come up with material that I otherwise wouldn’t have written”, Paul said in 2009.

The Stargate documentary can now be seen on NRK’s web-TV, but only within Norway.

Square Peg… final draft now available as MP3, WAV and CD

The final draft of Apparatjik’s Square Peg in a Round Hole album was released on Tuesday, February 21st.

Featuring new mixes, some new songs and a new cover, the album is now available for purchase in three formats at
theoutland.com; MP3, WAV and CD. The digital formats can be downloaded right away, while the CD starts shipping on March 19th.

The tracklist:

1. timepoLice (feat. Auto Goon)
2. cervux seQuential (feat. Lisa A)
3. tell the bAbes
4. signs of waking uP
5. do IT myself (feat. Auto Goon)
6. BlastLOCKet (feat. Ceto A and L Gortex A)
7. pakt
8. COmbat disco music
9. your voice needS SUBtitles
10. (don’t Eat The whole) banana
11. gzMO
12. superpositions
13. control Park

There will also be an Apparatjik “Augmented Reality” app available for iPhone and iPad on March 19th, which will apparently provide you with a special experience when used together with the CD cover.

 

Apparatjik have now also set up a page on NRK P3’s Urørt community, which is a sort of Norwegian MySpace for young, unsigned musicians.

“Urørt is the place in Norway where those most interested in music get together, and therefore the most exciting community for us to turn our attention to”, Magne says in an article on NRK.no.

The article also mentions that Apparatjik have been invited to perform on the Orange Stage at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark this summer. But this is yet to be officially confirmed.

The Voice – episode 4

Magne got one new talent for his team in Friday’s episode of The Voice; Kjell Ove Knudsen, who performed Coldplay’s “Fix You”.

Commenting on the performance, Magne said:

“That was a very fun little journey. The thing about Coldplay… [At Yosef:] I assume you’ll come up with a joke about how I’m friends with Coldplay. But that has nothing to do with it. I’m actually very sceptical when people attempt cover versions of songs like that, but you managed to add a certain desperation to it that touched me. There is a potential in you, and I would really like to come along on your journey, if you’ll let me.”

Magne now has nine talents on his team.

 

In other news, Magne is on the cover of gossip magazine Se og Hør’s weekend edition. Inside there is a 4-page article about his “dramatic life”.

The Voice – episode 3

Three new talents joined Team Magne in the third episode of The Voice on Friday.

Their blind auditions can be seen here: 
Heidi   Ruben   Tini

Magne has proven to be popular among the contestants and has ended up with 8 talents on his team so far. Hanne has 6, while Sondre and Yosef both have 5 talents on their teams.

The Voice – episode 2

Magne ended up with four contestants for his team in last night’s episode of The Voice. One of them, Monika Blomeid, almost moved him to tears with her version of Adele’s “Someone Like You”.

“I am stunned, this is not what I had expected. We hear a lot of good vocalists on this show, but you are in a class of your own”, Magne told her after the performance.

The blind auditions of Magne’s four new team members can be seen here:

Knut Anders  Marius  Yvonne  Monika

I’m not sure if the whole episode will be online for free this time – it might have been just for the premiere.

“I’m not very fond of the way talents are being developed these days, where they can sing opera one night and soul the next. I’m looking for a voice that sounds unique and has a powerful expression that I can believe in.

(…) If a voice gives me goosebumps, I’m not interested to know what else it can do. Then I just want for that person to continue doing the same thing that gives me that feeling. And that’s what I think is a problem with most talent shows today, they don’t focus enough on supporting that uniqueness. I always judge music by what I hear and not what I see”, Magne told magazine Her og Nå this week.

The Voice premieres in Norway

The Norwegian version of talent contest The Voice premiered on TV2 last night, with Magne as one of the four mentors.

The whole thing opened with the mentors performing Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida”, and there’s a video clip of the performance on TV2.no.

Magne ended up with one talent for his team in the first episode; Martin Halla, who sang Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know”.

The premiere was well-received by both the viewers and the press, with ‘5 out of 6’ ratings from VG and Dagbladet and a lot of positive feedback in social media.

Update: The whole 1 hour 10 minute show now seems to be available for free on TV2.no here.

 

In an interview with Dagbladet on Thursday, Magne said that he doesn’t regret taking part in the show:

“Many people around me have felt that I didn’t need to take the chance of doing this [show]. But if I hadn’t, someone else – potentially less suited – would have done it instead.”

“I have more experience than most people when it comes to this business and operating on an international level. Why shouldn’t I be able to share of that experience?”

“I hope I’ll encounter someone that I’ll want to nurture musically, and in a longer perspective than just this TV project.”

“If we’re able to create an international success, that would be the absolute coolest thing that could happen in my life at the moment”, Magne says.

 

In connection with The Voice, Magne has also set up an official Twitter account (@mfuruholmen), which he will use mainly in connection with the show and the talents he’ll choose. During the show, messages written in advance will appear on the TV-screen and on Twitter simultanously.

In his first message, he wrote (translated):

“help, now I’ve also joined twitter! i’m mainly intending to use it to promote my talents. all the weird stuff is elsewhere.”

So expect most of his messages to be in Norwegian, for the time being.

 

There will be 18 episodes of The Voice in total; blind auditions (7 episodes), battle rounds (6 episodes) and live shows (5 episodes). The final show takes place on May 25th.

Apparatjik release 24-bit studio-quality download

Square Peg recording session in Norway. 
(Picture from bowers-wilkins.com)

This week, Apparatjik are offering a 24-bit studio-quality version of their second album Square Peg in a Round Hole as a free download on their Facebook page (as “Draft 7”).

This is a high-quality FLAC version (472 MB) of the original 12-track album, which first appeared in lower MP3 quality as part of the “Apparatjik World” iPad app back in November and later as “Draft 1” in the ongoing fan collaboration project on Facebook.

Apparatjik are releasing this version of the album in collaboration with British loudspeaker company Bowers and Wilkins and their online community Society Of Sound.

“we go to quite an extent to make our music sound the way we want it to and it’s great to be able to offer a 24 bit version of the first draft of the album through society of sound. this exclusive release ‘square peg in a round hole – draft 7’ is mastered at abbey road studios by geoff pesche straight from our studio masters so what we listened to in studio is what you will hear”, the band says in a new blog post on the Society Of Sound website.

The whole blog post, where the band talk about the recording process and the fan collaboration project can be found here.

Video clip: first preview of The Voice

Magne says:
“My goal is to find an artist with international potential, a super talent. But if that doesn’t work out, I’ll settle for just winning the contest”.

This promo clip appeared on the official The Voice Facebook page.

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