FARMERS’S MARKED & NUTOPIA – Oslo – Cosmopolite Scene

Lately, I’ve started to discover more and more amazing Norwegian bands outside of the metal genre and it’s incredibly cool to see people from this part of the world loving and making music based on Eastern European and Balcanic sounds. One of these little wonders is called Nutopia and I discovered it via Green Carnation’s guitarist, Michael Krumins who plays guitars and bouzouki in this project. Nutopia was tonight’s opening band at the concert held at Cosmopolite Scene in Oslo.

So far, they have only released one album – Zabibu – and for me this was love at first listen. And love for the next 500 listens more or less in a row. It’s such good mood music with a simply beautiful music based on violin/guitar/bouzouki ‘dialogues’ with groovy percussion and contrabass to set the rhythm. While the feeling of balkan music is omnipresent in the album, there’s a bit of this and a bit of that from many places in the world, so the sound overall is very international. Unfortunately, the band only got to perform for 25 minutes tonight, so they didn’t get to walk the crowd through all the places they gathered inspiration from. Yet, I’m pretty sure they made a fantastic impression by the amount of applauses they received after each song. The loudest ones were probably also caused by their dancer, Ornilia Percia F. Ubisse, who came in front of the stage for only two songs, but the second one she wore a nice ‘winged’ costume and did a stunning dance on the rhythms of ‘When I’m feeling good’. A feeling that I personally had all along the concert, and by the amount of smiles on the stage it seemed that everyone in Nutopia was having a great time. I can only hope this is the first (?) of tens or even hundreds of concerts that I’m going to see with this band and I highly recommend you give them a try. Certainly a recipe for feeling good. 
I am attaching an image captured with the mobile, but there are way better quality videos on youtube in order for you to see the fantastic dance performed during the Nutopia concert.

Farmer’s Market are a band who shouldn’t need any concert review for those who have already seen them live. And for those who haven’t, any review will not make them justice. Besides the fact that they have such a groovy music on their discs, they combine it with so much humor and jamming on stage that even the musicians spend half of the concert laughing. I always see few people surprised on how the band manages to make transitions between songs and, despite the fact that tehy cannot use the multitude of instruments as on the original record, the songs still sound as if played by more than 6 people. I can’t recall if I’ve previously seen the band performing with both Trifon Trifonov on saxophone and Filip Simeonov on clarinet. But the clarinet stole the show several times tonight. I actually reliase I don’t know which of the band’s song were actually performed, mainly due their live arrangements. But it was so fun to hear them covering ‘Never gonna change my love for you’ (or something like that, an old Glenn Medeiros MTV hit) and even more fun to hear a small song play in the style of ‘Tails of the Unexpected’. Another highlight of the evening was when both Carstensen and Simeonov played two ocarina-like instruments. While the other band members were about to die laughing, Simeonov played such a beautiful melody that reminded me so much of my childhood. And Carstensen wasn’t really failing at playing something himself, but let’s just say it didn’t have the same vibe.

With a music that’s full of personality and doesn’t let you stand still, Farmer’s Market are a joy to watch and one of the finest Norwegian products when it comes to mixing jazz, folk and Balkan rhythms. I left laughing from the concert and I am always grateful to a band who manages to do this with their performance.