But if you consider that we don’t use much technology at all when we write the songs, the idea an entirely acoustic show makes total sense. And in many of our concerts we’ve also played some acoustic songs. Pål: “We’ve talked about this idea for so many years. The other half is that the idea of a-ha playing their vast catalogue of world hits stripped down to their very essence is indeed a promising endeavor. Yet the beauty of the North Atlantic Ocean, the light of the midnight sun and the exclusivity of the concerts are only one half of the story. As Magne Furuholmen puts it: “These were by far the most intimate concerts we’ve ever given.” Suffice to say, the concerts were sold-out within minutes, as a-ha were to play “concerts so close to our audience like never before”. a-ha performed in front of an audience of just 250 people - the Øygardshallen’s glass front allowed the audience to gaze out into the pale night and onto a number of LED video steles that had been set up behind the band, serving as a minimalist backdrop to the concert. The nearby Øygardshallen (Giske Harbour Hall) turned out to be the perfect venue to stage their two first ever acoustic shows: They simply had to lay cables from A to B and then were able to use the studio at Ocean Sound Recordings to capture the shows perfectly. We knew that we could rehearse undisturbed in an extremely good sounding facility.”Ī-ha booked the Ocean Sound Recordings studio, which looks out onto the ocean, to revisit their own back catalogue for two weeks together with producer Lars Horntveth, who had already been working on the acoustic arrangements for more than half a year. At the end of the day it was the Ocean Sound Recordings studio in Giske that made the difference. We were discussing many different places to play these special shows - among them Manaus in the Amazon jungle, Berlin, London and New York.
Pål Waaktaar-Savoy: “Choosing Giske is like most of the things we do: It’s been 50% chance and 50% planned.
#TAKE ON ME UNPLUGGED SERIES#
And from there you finally have to drive through a series of seemingly endless and frighteningly deep undersea tunnels to reach Giske, an island so beautiful and, well, remote, that one immediately wonders why a-ha handpicked this specific location to play their long awaited first MTV Unplugged shows on the night of the 2017 summer solstice, right where the world seems to end. Coming from destinations all over the world, for them getting to Giske meant embarking on a plane to Oslo and from there to Ålesund. But a-ha’s audience didn’t get to Giske on such boats.
Giske is a tiny island in close proximity to the city of Ålesund on the shore of the North Atlantic Ocean - a popular city much frequented by day trippers arriving on huge cruise ships during Norway’s short yet intense summer season. This is especially true during the summer solstice, when the sun hardly sets at all, bathing the small Norwegian island of Giske – where a-ha played their first ever two acoustic concerts – in an eerie twilight. In the land of the midnight sun, the clocks tick slightly different than they do elsewhere.
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