In the winter of 2012/13, Motorpsycho was approached by Trondheim’s biggest cultural festival, Olavsfestdagene (OFD). The festival’s director had seen Motorpsycho and Ståle Storløkken perform their 2012 album Death Defying Unicorn in its entirety at the National Opera House in Oslo that winter, and was wondering whether the band and Ståle would be interested in doing something on the same scale for OFD that summer too.
This being just weeks after the final Death Defying Unicorn performance, both the band and Ståle needed a little time before committing to another “big piece” and passed on the offer, but it was agreed to try to make it happen once the then disassembled Steinmeyer church organ was fully restored in 2014, or perhaps at a later time…
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…when they all hopefully felt more inclined to grapple with the intricacies of bigger works again. When contact was re-established a year later, the challenge proved irresistible, and a new work was commissioned for the 2014 OFD. On 31th July the band and Ståle together with Kammerkoret Aurum and Sheriffs of Nothingness performed En Konsert for Folk Flest in the mighty Nidarosdomen cathedral in their hometown of Trondheim.
Documenting an event that most likely will never be repeated, this is a unique album in many ways, one being that all the lyrics, sung by the 24-piece choir, for the first time in the band’s history are in Norwegian. OFD is a weeklong celebration of cultural diversity, and has a new theme each year. In 2014 the theme of the festival was “Folk”. This is roughly analogous to the English “folk”, but the term seems to have a slightly wider connotation here. In Norwegian it can mean people in an ethnic sense as well as nation in a cultural sense, and doesn’t necessarily carry all the folkloristic connotations that it does in English. MP’s brief was to write a concert piece that somehow reflected this theme. The lyrical theme took a few weeks to pinpoint, but when the penny dropped the task quickly became interesting. The words to the finished piece focus on the peculiar Norwegian notion of “folk flest”. This is a term used by politicians and suchlike to signify “most people”. In addition to writing the prose pieces that were printed in the concert programme specifically made for the occasion, and included here in the booklet, author and friend Johan Harstad came onboard and functioned as a lyrics consultant in the process. Musically this format also represented quite a few new challenges for the band. Writing for a choir is obviously quite a different task than writing for a hard rock trio, and one that the band hadn’t grappled with before. To all involved, it was thus important that the music retained a genuinely Motorpsychodelic feel and did not come off like some “choir music” pastiche. Ståle’s take on the compositional minutiae of this work is obviously fully his own – he remains a truly unique writer no matter the context – but the combination of his and Motorpsycho’s musical languages is also quite often a very special and explosive one, one that seems to be an ever more effective thing even in unusual settings like a cathedral.