Featured on a number of album releases, as well as a series of tours in Europe, Kristin has focused mainly on work with her ensembles Dadafon and Krøyt where her own compositions play a core role. While she has also won several national Music Awards and the last year Kristin has made her international debut as a film score composer for the American movie Factotum, based on a novel by Charles Bukowski.

16 years ago Kristin inherited a great number of relatively unknown spirituals from the Afro-American singer Ruth Reese; African-American spirituals are religious folksongs, passed down in the oral tradition by African slaves in the US, from the beginning of the 17th century. Kristin said; "I was immediately touched by the richness of these songs. I was humbled and, at the same time, felt an urge to find my own way into the songs. This process moved me strongly - as a young singer and improviser - and created an important base for all I have done since.”

The African-American spirituals are existential...

Featured on a number of album releases, as well as a series of tours in Europe, Kristin has focused mainly on work with her ensembles Dadafon and Krøyt where her own compositions play a core role. While she has also won several national Music Awards and the last year Kristin has made her international debut as a film score composer for the American movie Factotum, based on a novel by Charles Bukowski.

16 years ago Kristin inherited a great number of relatively unknown spirituals from the Afro-American singer Ruth Reese; African-American spirituals are religious folksongs, passed down in the oral tradition by African slaves in the US, from the beginning of the 17th century. Kristin said; "I was immediately touched by the richness of these songs. I was humbled and, at the same time, felt an urge to find my own way into the songs. This process moved me strongly - as a young singer and improviser - and created an important base for all I have done since.”

The African-American spirituals are existential expressions of life: songs of longing, mourning, struggling, loneliness, hopefulness and joyful traveling. Just as the spirituals were originally used to transcend the narrow limits of slavery, I experience over and over again that the songs touch upon our struggles of modern life, our own quests for personal freedom, movement and protection.

These songs touch me personally because they, through their open, repetitive words and melodies, give me access to a place where I feel included and embraced. These are songs both to lean on and to take nourishment from.  They are about holding and being held. The songs are most of all beautiful and important to me, they are sacred songs I want to express from my musical point of view today."

(Shrink Text)