From Icelandic, blómi translates as “bloom” or “flower”. Other song titles from the new album by Norway's Susanne Sundfør also look Icelandic. Actually, it’s Old Norse, which informs modern Icelandic. Although one track is recited in German the lyrics elsewhere, as per her other albums, are in English. The linguist fluidity telegraphs Blómi is not necessarily straightforward.

Sick of Myself is being marketed as one of those oh so clever satirical comedies about privileged but fucked-up people. Think Worst Person in the World, Triangle of Sadness and The White Lotus and you’ll get the genre.

Two drummers are drumming. One held the beat on ABBA’s “Super Trouper”. He is Sweden’s Per Lindvall, more usually associated with jazz. The other is Norway’s Rune Arnesen, whose recording credits are also stylistically varied. Locked-in tight together, their groove provides the backbone for a band led by Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær, whose 1996 album Khmer was his first for the ECM label. This is a live revisitation of the album.

You don’t have to be Scandinavian to act out Strindberg’s fantastical extremes at the highest level, but I’ve not seen any British performers come close to what Norwegians are giving us right now at the Coronet Theatre. Expectations ran high following Pia Tjelta’s lacerating performance in Ibsen’s Little Eyolf in 2018 and her Ellida in The Lady from the Sea the following year, and here, as then, she and her colleagues are simply stunning.

Ambient is everywhere now. After a quiet (lol) 2000s, when it rather disappeared into the cracks, perhaps tarred with the sense that the more cosmic sides of the Nineties rave experience were passé, beatless music steadily rose in profile through the 2010s – aided by the rise of “post-classical”, increased accustomisation to home cinema and immersive gaming soundtracks, the wellness movement.

We’re told from childhood that it’s rude to stare at people, but sometimes it’s hard to extinguish that desire and sitting in a dark cinema can provide the perfect opportunity. If seing Vicky Krieps in Hold Me Tight and Corsage left you craving more screen time with her, More than Ever might just satiate that yen. It’s another chance to allow this fine-featured, body-confident actor to show her emotional range to us watchers in the shadows.

Carvings is recorded so it sounds as if Juni Habel is adjacent to the listener’s ear. The Norwegian singer-songwriter may as well be inches away. Such intimacy can be disconcerting, especially as Carvings evokes a reflective melancholy. Its eight crepuscular songs evoke twilight and wintertime, when introspection is never far.

Movie-watchers are wallowing in the back catalogues. I hunted down theartsdesk's readership stats for the film reviews I’d written this year. Top of the list was not a new release at all, but the new extras-loaded Blu-ray version of Bertrand Tavernier’s 'Round Midnight (1986).

The Oslo World organisers are at pains to point out that, despite the name, they are not a “world music” festival. And with good reason, really. There may have been a few familiar WOMAD veterans headlining over the week-long event – Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour, Malie's Fatoumata Diawara, the queen of Cuba Omara Portuondo – but the emphasis was emphatically not on any kind of beads-and-bongoes authenticity.

“What about the communication with the audience?” asked violinist and impresario Bjarte Eike in his First Person piece for theartsdesk. “How can a 'normal' concert be turned into a special event?” Explaining how is one thing – but doing it to dazzle our senses is what counts. Though the Alehouse Session which followed out in the foyer was brilliant business more or less as usual, “Purcell’s Playhouse” took us further on the road of making the old absolutely new.