Northern Norwegian artist, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Sunniva Strauman Halstensen, also known as Sólstrauman, combines vocal-driven ambient, chamber-pop, electronic atmospheres, lo-fi, folk tonality and field recordings. As a narcoleptic, Sólstrauman sunstreams her music from beyond this realm with a thinner veil than most. This is where symphonies can vibrate as clear as day, and unwritten songs might sound like the radio.
Kvitevind, Sólstrauman’s debut album, was released September 2024, with the label Re:Memory, followed up by an EP in May 2025, consisting of a reimagined version of How The River Flows, as well as two remixes. The same year she collaborated with the Olafur Árnalds-founded label OPIA, with a song called Found, which was yet another close collaboration with Saltbreaker.
In 2025, Sólstrauman commissioned work for Russian dance theater company Paradise Theatre, and their performance He Wept Softly. She also commissioned a piece for choir, performed three times both in Norway and Scandinavia, summer 2025. Toward the end of the same year Sólstrauman received a generous grant from The Supporting Act Foundation in collaboration with Will Smith, as an emerging artist facing discrimination.
Sólstrauman blends her other-worldly vocals with and without lyrics into drone layers from church organ and electric guitar with cello bow, landing in contrasting states of dark and light, atmospheric soundscapes between the eerie and the ethereal. Live electronics and field recordings gives that last colour to her work, in experimental, disturbing, soothing ways.
Her music is all in all genre-busting, but often consists of elements from experimental, film music, church music, folk music, dark ambient, world music and spiritual, meditative music. In her newer work she is more and more often combining all this with a alternative post-rock inspired sound image, where her past as a rock guitarist meets the sound of her softer debut album, Kvitevind.
The church organ is a central element in Sólstrauman’s music. Both her parents are organists, and she grew up with her mother also being a choir conductor, in Bodø Domkirke. Getting the music in church “in with her mother’s milk”, as we say in Norway, Sólstrauman transforms this into gothic-styled music where past and future meet.
The arctic nature above the polar circle, in Northern Norway, has shaped Sólstrauman’s music deeply. In her Norwegian lyrics she combines the written language of Modern Norwegian, nynorsk (as opposed to the default Dano-Norwegian, bokmål, for most of Norwegians), with Northern Norwegian dialect. Still, English remains the main language of most of Sólstrauman’s work.
Her inspirations draw from Sigur Rós, Björk, Radiohead and Sara Parkman, with their avant-garde music in all its shapes and forms, with room for authenticity and art in the center. This is where music can come alive just as it is, not only in concert halls, but anywhere, including churches, and other sacred spaces of reverb, magic and myth. This is where music can be a deeply spiritual, healing experience, as well as a challenging one, and a place for science and musicology to speak.
The raw and wild, expressed from the heart.
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Sólstrauman 