Zenon Return with ‘Syn’, Three Years After ‘Arven’
It’s nearly three years since we premiered ‘Arven’, the second album by Norwegian group Zenon. Filip Zenon Ramberg was then writing about inheritance, family and the things we carry with us, whether we understand them or not.
The new record is called ‘Syn’, a Norwegian word meaning “vision” or “sight”. Ramberg came to this music through 60s psych, then jazz and traditional folk, and somewhere along the way those interests opened out into meditation and older traditions. You can hear some of that on ‘Syn’, although thankfully the album never makes a great fuss about it. These ideas are simply there in the background.
There are six songs and the whole thing lasts just over half an hour. Ramberg plays guitars, drums, piano and synthesisers, Michelle Uller sings, Martin van Houtum plays bass and Per Christian Berg produces. It’s much the same group of people who made ‘Arven’, which makes sense. They know one another well enough by now for the music not to sound overthought.
When we spoke about ‘Arven’ in 2023, Ramberg told us that much of it had been recorded live, with first or early takes often proving to be the best ones. Once everybody knew the material too well, he felt that something could easily go missing. He also spoke about playing with van Houtum almost as a dance. They had first played together roughly twenty years earlier, when they were teenagers practising drums and bass in an empty swimming pool at their secondary school. Well, that tells you quite a lot about the relationship between them.
Zenon have never been frightened of letting a song run. ‘Så et bilde’ lasts more than seven minutes and ‘I dans med sol og måne’ is close to ten, while the other four are all much shorter. It doesn’t feel odd when you listen to the album. The longer pieces simply need a little more time.
There is quite a bit going on with the guitars, acoustic and electric, often in open tunings, but they are not constantly fighting for attention. At times things get heavier, then a minute later the arrangement can become surprisingly bare. Van Houtum does much more than simply hold everything together underneath, and Uller has become such an important part of Zenon that it would be very difficult to imagine the band without her voice now.
You can hear where some of this comes from. Scandinavian prog and psych, folk, jazz and bits of acid rock are all in there somewhere. Ramberg has previously mentioned Hendrix’s ‘Band of Gypsys’, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’, Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’ and Dungen’s ‘Ta Det Lugnt’ among the records that meant a great deal to him. By this point, though, Zenon don’t sound as though they are trying to remind you of any of them. Those records have simply been around long enough to become part of how Ramberg hears music.
I also like the song titles: ‘La meg bli’, ‘Skyggen’, ‘Så et bilde’, ‘I dans med sol og måne’, ‘Det eldste språket’ and ‘Minne fra en drøm’. A shadow, a picture, a dance with the sun and moon, the oldest language, a memory from a dream. They fit the record without explaining it for you.
‘Arven’ spent quite a lot of time looking backwards, at family and what gets handed down. ‘Syn’ feels a little more open-ended. Ramberg is still asking questions, only this time he seems less interested in giving them names.
Headline credit: Sebastian Gibba
