Silje Nes

Silje Nes from Norway entered her recording career with extensive prior involvement in music, among them formal classical piano instruction plus stints as an orchestral timpanist, a marching band drummer, and an indie pop performer. Nevertheless, the tracks assembled for her first album, Ames Room, favored a freer, more instinctive and atmospheric style that bypassed her academic grounding, relying instead on guitar, cello, and loop pedals together with four-track and laptop methods she had scarcely used before.

She grew up in a modest settlement along Norway’s largest fjord and, in 2000, relocated to Bergen, a focal point of the national music community, in order to study philosophy. Home experiments with recording soon followed, beginning as purely instrumental and electronic sketches before gradually incorporating her soft, ethereal singing, lightly picked electric guitar lines, and live drumming.

An unsolicited demo reached FatCat Records, the imprint associated with like-minded experimental acts such as Múm and Mice Parade, resulting in the worldwide release of Ames Room—material spontaneously written and captured between 2004 and 2007—in January 2008; the North American edition appeared the following March together with the digital-only Yellow EP, drawn from the same sessions.

Until then she had performed live on only a few occasions and had seldom played her music even for friends, yet she toured widely in support of the album, among other dates undertaking a string of U.S. shows with the Dodos.

Her next album, Opticks, issued in 2010, displayed a smoother finish while still being produced entirely inside her own home studio.