like Zu, will always be a minority concern, Jørgen Munkeby is more than happy to

Shining’s emulsion of freeform jazz and metal an anomaly, an outlier boasting spectacular
is hard to swallow. Jazz has an improvisational
vigour which doesn’t necessarily sit well with
the regimented arrangements of modern rock
and metal, and it takes balls to construct a
sound from such disparate sounds.
A bit like grafting arms onto a pig and
training it to be a surgeon, there’s something
quite Dr Frankenstein about sticking
saxophones and swing beats to metal. But the
two can cohabit, even if it makes life difficult
for both musician and listener. Because of this,
Shining, like similarly avant
avant-minded artists
position himself at the outer reaches of genre,
musical DNA. With a jazz player’s individualist
streak secured within the structure of a rock
band, Shining have an unhinged quality that
makes their latest longplayer ‘Black Jazz’
so compelling, yet challenging at the same
time. Opener ‘The Madness And The Damage
Done’ is a baptism in anarchic skronk, setting
the tone for an album that eclipses its 2007
predecessor, the superlative ‘Grindstone’,
and leaves not one lasting impression of the
Oslo jazz-prog metal wayfarers, but several.
Saxophonist/guitarist/vocalist (in that order)
and look back with some fondness on the
dialectical storm sired in the wake of his
band’s artistic bravado.
“I want the music to be a pleasure to listen
to, of course, but I want it to be interesting
to people who would normally be bored of
other music,” he says, keen to engage in
existentialist discourse as to whether Shining
are a rock/metal band or straight-up jazz but
not forthcoming with an answer either way. “I
was very interested with maths and that sort of
thing, music is also a theoretical thing for me

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so I am very happy that people are wanting to
discuss it in detail, the theory behind it, and
the places behind my musical and historical
perspective.” Perhaps the common link that
binds Shining’s take on jazz is their divining of
a sense of darkness. There is a noir atmosphere
that brackets Shining in the twilight, and
similarly, not all jazz was or is good time be-
bop. There is an edge there, too.
“Some [John] Coltrane stuff is really super-
dark and full of energy and seriousness and
spirituality, which I think fits very well with
a lot of metal,” posits Munkeby. “There are
a lot of elements in these different musical
SHINING PG 32-33.indd 2
genres that are very simple, so it was not that
hard to put them together. Definitely, there is
darkness in a lot of jazz. In jazz there has been
a big focus on improvisation and freeform
[arrangements]. A lot of jazz, if you look at
the more traditional types of jazz, it looks
on the surface like it is very free, but still it’s
really structured. There are a lot of people who
play by the book, who have a lot of scales
and tones and pitches, which correspond
with chords. A lot of people have pre-learned
licks. Some jazz is not that free, but there
are big movements, and there has been a big
movement since the ‘60s, with Ornette Coleman
and John Coltrane; they’ve been focussing on
freeing the music and freeing yourself from all
the strict, traditional guidelines and rules. That
was been one of our most difficult tasks, of
combining these genres, trying to combine that
improvisational approach to composing music
with more strict rigid songs. Because we still
want to play songs.”
It’s not just jazz that inflects Shining’s sound;
parping, rasping synth electronica courtesy
of Bernt Moen helps ‘Blackjazz’ transcend
the traditional genre prism of rock and jazz,
sharing a barely containable energy redolent
of Lightning Bolt. So, too, is there a profound
influence from deceased French composer
Olivier Messiaen and America’s auteur supreme
David Lynch, both of which Munkeby cites as
key constituents to informing the quasi-surreal
and dark atmosphere that sauces much of
‘Blackjazz’. It also helped that producer/mixer
Sean Beavan, who worked with Nine Inch Nails
and Marilyn Manson on David Lynch’s ‘Lost
Highway’ soundtrack, assisted Munkeby with
the production of the record. But whatever
Shining’s jonesing for improvisational nirvana,
technical ecstasy or whatever, it is the notion
of the song as a recognisable beast that gets
Munkeby most excited. And this time round
those songs enjoyed a lengthy gestation.
Says Munkeby; “Usually it takes a lot of
time to make the albums and then after a year
of playing the songs we start to develop our
ability to develop the free [elements] with the
rigid compositions. For the first time in five
years we managed to spend a lot of time and
energy with the band, making arrangements
with the band, and live arrangements with
that extra energy so we would be able to
implement improvisational arrangements
within the record.”
The balance between composition and
improvisation has been a fervent element
to discussing aesthetics within music. As
Munkeby says, there are learned licks, learned
scales, phrasing and knowledge that would
always have a massive influence of what a
musician would produce on the fly, and that
can only colour the notion of improvisation
being truly independent of composition. For
Shining, when taking their songs on the road,
rather than endorsing the Coleman/Coltrane
inspired movement of freeform improvisation,
the band’s songs will evolve naturally, if at all.
Munkeby admits that the Norwegian
quartet’s songs evolve on the road yet refutes
the notion that to appreciate the band you
have to see them live. For Shining, it is a
question of performance of the record. “When
I make an album I see it as its own entity, it
isn’t tied to anything else, it should work on
its own. We want the album to be as good
as possible. It has been very hard to combine
these complex structures and compositions,
because they take so much time, it’s so hard
to just perform them. If you perform, making
an album where there is a lot of performance,
usually the songs are pretty simple. I really
like Sunn O))). Their music is extremely simple,
but it is easy to play so you can focus on
playing it beautifully. If the songs are really
hard you have less energy to focus on playing
it interestingly. There is no buffer! Your CPU
is used to the full amount all the time… that
freedom to play [well], that’s important for us.”
Freedom inherits a certain responsibility,
even for Shining. While they are hardly fenced
in to genre, they have to actually market
themselves. Many of you may recognise
them from their 2007 tour with Enslaved,
whose Grutle Kjellson offers guest vocals on
‘Blackjazz’s cover of King Crimson perennial
‘21st Century Schizoid Man’. But who are the
Shining’s audience, the prog fans, the jazz fans
or the cerebral metalhead? Munkeby, who grew
up on Entombed and Dream Theater before
studying at the Norwegian National Academy
Of Music, says it could be anyone.
“I’ve been discussing this with the people
who are working on this album, like the
promoters, the label and the distributors, and
I told them that we are one of the lucky few
bands who have more than one type of music
fan. We have jazz people, some of the more
traditional ones to the more open-minded jazz
people, then we have like hipster fans, the
Pitchfork Media, the Wire crowd, and then we
have the metal people… We have a really wide
[fanbase]. And we are not Satanic! That helps.
It’s easier for people to follow.”
‘Blackjazz’ is out now on Indie
www.myspace.com/shiningofficial
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