“I recently moved to Tromsø in the far north above the polar circle,” says main-songwriter Gustav Jørgen Pedersen about the origins of Brefjære. “One day I looked out the where I see the mountains and the birch trees and I found myself wondering, if they could speak, what would they be telling each other?” Thus, a mythical conversation between the wind, a mountain, a birch tree and a butterfly was born inspired by classical traditions such as Greek tragedies and the oratorios of the Baroque, but also by the musical journey of Spurv itself. “This album contains elements even from before we started Spurv back in 2011. Some of these ideas I’ve been working on for over 10 years” continues Pedersen, divulging how Brefjære is a result of a decade-long process as much as a contemporary snapshot.

you vanish with no guile and I will not pay,

but the soul can wait

STEREOGUM: You’ve been playing a lot of older material and some songs you’ve never played live before on this tour. What is your relationship to old Nine Inch Nails music? Are there songs that you absolutely would never want to perform again? Are there songs that feel great every time you sing them even if they’re 20 years old?

REZNOR: The trap I realized I was falling into even as far back as The Downward Spiral was that once we had a little bit of a budget and we could put on a show, I always thought, “If I have your attention for a few hours and you’re coming out to see us, let’s transform the place into a spectacle. Let’s make it the best setting to hear music in, let’s put care into every aspect we can control.” Particularly production onstage — let’s really make it something cool. And a lot of times that was based on the technology available at the time and the budget of how much you could spend on it. How can you use that stuff in a creative way to make it a multimedia show to some degree? And the trap that you get into is how do you outdo it the next time? How do you reinvent the wheel the next time? And the second part of that is the consequence that wasn’t obvious at the beginning of that process was you end up limiting what you can play because everything becomes choreographed around a finite amount of stuff. Does this song have content with it? You can’t just pull shit out of your ass.

If you have a hole of a few songs that don’t have any [accompanying media] it feels weird. You get locked in — you’re playing the same 20 songs a night, maybe you have 30 you shuffle around. In a time before everyone was on the internet sharing everything you do the first second it happens, you could get away with that to a degree. But it also gets real boring after the second week of touring. You know what you’re going to do and many times I’ve been onstage and I can’t stay present. I’m thinking about everything, but I’m not thinking about the song I’m playing. I look out at the audience and they look the same and I’m wearing the same clothes, I’m playing the same song.

I had a kind of awakening a few years ago sitting on my couch watching a Coachella livestream from the comfort of my living room and now that big video wall that you had to pay to bring out is part of the stage. And in the advent of the electronic musician that comes in with a flash drive and plugs in their content and hits the spacebar and music plays and the video plays and seeing 10 bands or acts in a row that it’s all visuals and bullshit — lip-syncing — I think that paradigm’s dead. Walk into the Sahara Tent at Coachella and you’re surrounded by hundreds of video screens and lazers and you can’t compete with that and people have seen that and it’s not as exciting as it was 20 years ago. So let’s just go play, you know? And not in a stripped-down acoustic way but like, I think about seeing the Cure in the ‘80s and the Jesus And Mary Chain and there was no production other than it’s smokey and kinda scary. Seeing Swans, I was wondering if I was going to be murdered, if my head was going to explode from the bass.

That feeling — I didn’t see that from my couch. I saw lots of clever production and expensive videos. Getting rid of all that shit and stripping it down allows us to kind of do whatever we want. And that opened the door to finally answer your question: Most of what we play is stuff that still feels relevant in some way or feels OK to play. There’s a number of songs that we don’t just because it doesn’t feel like me anymore or it doesn’t feel authentic. And there’s a handful of songs on this tour that I don’t particularly feel an affection towards but because of the novelty of we’ve never played them, I know it’ll be exciting for superfans that seem to live for those type of things.

so fucking intense, inspirational, spiritual, beautiful..