KAADA & MIKE PATTON – Fvll performance @ Roskilde Festival (2005)

Kaada (born 28 July 1975) is a Norwegian singer-songwriter, producer, film score composer and multi-instrumentalist. Kaada’s career spans a string of solo albums, motion picture soundtracks, high-profile collaborations with key players such as Mike Patton, as well as numerous live appearances at home and abroad.

Kaada´s debut in a recorded format came with his 2001 solo album Thank You for Giving Me Your Valuable Time. A musical blend of woo-wop, show tunes and jungle rhythms into a coherent mix of live instrumentation and electronic elements, fusing elements of five decades of popular music. Thank You for Giving Me Your Valuable Time firmly established Kaada as a key voice on Norway´s blossoming music scene. The album was named as one of the ten most important releases of the year by Billboard.

2006 saw the release of Music for Moviebikers (Ipecac Recordings), a collection of lush arrangements set as soundtracks for imaginary films. The album features an evocative quality as it sets out to bring the two musical worlds of Kaada together; the one of the recording artist with the cinematic film music one. The albums´s 22-strong ensemble consists of traditional instrumentation with strings, vocals and electric guitars as well as homemade instruments and some exotic folk music performers hailing from various corners of Europe. The strings were recorded in the Vigeland mausoleum in Oslo.

2009’s outing Junkyard Nostalgias with its myriad sounds and instruments. The album was conceived as a self-proclaimed homage to the thousands of Polish workers that have come to Norway to earn a better living and to fuel the country´s economy with cheap labour. Junkyard Nostalgias featured Kaada playing all of the instruments on the album, solidifying his personal universe of sound. Kaada have said about the album that he made it to justify buying hundreds of instruments on eBay.

Kaada/Patton albums

• Romances (2004)

• Bacteria Cult (2016)

A milestone in Kaada´s career came in 2004 with the release of the album Romances – a joint effort with Faith No More and Tomahawk vocalist Mike Patton An eerily addicting work with inspirations from classical music, Romances features the two composers working in tandem to create a slow-moving large piece based in late romanticism which again is made up of nine smaller pieces, resembling a symphony’s compositional structure. In many ways, ‘Romances’ pays homage to Kaada’s musical upbringing that included classical training from age six to 20 and a repertoire spanning form Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Béla Bartók. The titles are lifted from old pieces from the Romantic period.

2007 saw the release of Kaada/Patton’s Kaada/Patton Live DVD (Ipecac Recordings) – a live recording from the 2005 Roskilde Festival featuring a seven-piece ensemble playing mostly the repertoire of Romances. The outing features the full festival set as well as behind the scenes from the key event. Kaada and Patton have maintained their musical bond over the last decade. Spring 2016 sees the release of their new joint effort Bacteria Cult.