The two unusually boundary-breaking and genre-defying artists Juliana Venter and Rolf-Erik Nystrøm, originally from opposite ends of the globe, are releasing their long-awaited debut album Kassandra. Here, the duo takes us into their unique musical universe and presents their years-long collaboration and intimate interplay between voice and saxophone.
The album also features exclusive guest appearances from some of their closest musical partners over many years—leading figures on the internationally acclaimed Norwegian music scene for decades: Paal Nilssen-Love on gongs and drums, Nils Økland on violin and Hardanger fiddle, and Mats Eilertsen on double bass. The record is produced by composer Rolf Wallin, mixed by Kåre Vestrheim, and recorded by Morten Qvenild—making this an album of unusual encounters between musical powerhouses, some of whom are working together for the very first time.
The album is titled Kassandra after the Greek legend of the Trojan princess who was granted the gift of foresight by the lovestruck Apollo, but who, after rejecting his advances, was cursed never to be believed. The record also includes music set to poems by Georg Trakl and South African poet Wopko Jensma, as well as Rolf Wallin’s remix of all the musicians’ interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s achingly beautiful Hymn of the Cherubim. The cover art is an original painting by Wayne Barker, one of South Africa’s most renowned artists. Juliana Venter met saxophonist Rolf-Erik Nystrøm in Cape Town in 2012. Since then, they have performed countless concerts together in Europe and South Africa, as well as in Morocco, Lebanon, the USA, China, and Japan.
The duo also won the Golden Chair for Best Film—where they improvised dialogue and music—at the International Short Film Festival in Grimstad 2024, competing against 3,500 other films, and they recently premiered a commissioned work at a concert exclusively for Haruki Murakami, Liv Ullmann, Jiří Kylián, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and the Norwegian Queen Sonja.
Through their studies and musical explorations around the world—often in Africa, Asia, and South America—they have gradually developed an organic relationship with a wide range of musical styles. On the album, one can encounter music from the early Baroque, jazz at its most intimate, works derived from ancient Greek myths, the musicians’ own musical heritage from Norwegian and South African traditions, as well as music inspired by ancient Chinese and Japanese forms, contemporary music, and Dadaist poetry. Birdsongs, too, serve as a recurring source of inspiration—sometimes quiet, at other times erupting in cascading bursts of sound and interference. Yet the expression they possess is always unmistakably their own.
