Before we start I have to profess that I’m not the best person to comment on intense piano music. My father was self-learning the piano and had just started teaching me until my mother decided the thing cluttered up the living room and surreptitiously got rid of it.
Then I turned to the drums until the neighbours complained, loudly. The rock dream died and that’s why you won’t find a Wiki page for me.
But I do still have an ear for a nice piece of playing and Øystein Skar makes a habit of that. He’s released a couple of albums and several EPs over the last decade since parting company with Highasakite, flying his own soaring kite as one of Norway’s leading composers either solo or in various collaborations with others.
He was once a regular here, under his own name or as SkarWorX, but we lost track of him over the last year or so. I do know he released the mainly piano based 10-track album ‘Hem’ last May to great critical acclaim.
‘Lonkjé’ (which doesn’t translate into anything particular in English) wasn’t on that album and I don’t even know when it was recorded or if it has been at all. If not, it’s something he needs to put right in my humble opinion.
It’s a fascinating piece of playing. There is only one track on ‘Hem’, a gentle, minimalist, at times soporific (in the nicest way) album, which bears any comparison, the synthesised ‘Levva’.
What he has done on ‘Lonkjé’ is something that you rarely hear: making a complex piece of music that verges on classical, eminently listenable. When I’m listening to classical pianists or violinists I often get the impression that they are trying to break the world speed record as Emerson and Wakemen used to do in the 1970’s prog rock King of the Keyboards battles; and at the expense of anything that vaguely sounds like a tune.
Or like a rap-ster might jam as many ridiculously rhyming words into a verse as they can.
But there’s plenty of melody here. Nothing is lost in the maelstrom which seems to use every key on the board.
And speaking of Emerson some parts of it remind me of sections of ELP’s work, including the immortal ‘Just take a pebble’ which scores it even more Brownie Points.
It also reminds me of a composition that the band Löv, of which Øystein Skar is still a member as far as I know, produced early on during the pandemic lockdowns in a live online show. I’m fairly confident it was called ‘Korona Toccata’, and this is a toccata as far as I can tell. It was a fabulous piece of music that I only heard a couple of times before it disappeared off social media.
I’m going off message here to conclude but as I may have mentioned before now, I’d like to see that ‘super group’ as they were billed – Øystein, Marte Eberson (who completes her second solo album under her own name soon) and ‘The Voice’ winning vocalist Martin Halla record another album now, and perhaps get out on the road, if they can find the time.
Having seen them perform live at By:Larm in 2020 I tipped them for the very top, even going so far as to suggest that Highasakite might open for them one day (stranger things happen at sea) and like the Donald I don’t like to be disappointed!
Øystein’s latest single, ‘Trace’ was released on 17th October.
This video was recorded at Lørenskog Hus, about 15 km east of Oslo, in September 2025.
Filmed by: Bjørnar Strømsholm.
Sound engineering, mixing and mastering: Bjarne Stensli
Find Øystein on:
Website: https://www.oysteinskar.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000551982361
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oysteinskar/
