Norway's SHINING Wins 'A-Ha Grant'

July 27, 2010

Last month, the Norwegian "blackjazz" outfit SHINING surprised the ever-growing international jazz-metal scene by taking home the fabled "A-Ha Grant" after first "shocking the living shit" out of the audience of 80,000 people and about one million TV viewers. Even more shocking was the fact that the members of A-HA, the most successful pop act ever to come out of Norway (remember "Take On Me"?),themselves chose SHINING as their favorite band. In addition to giving SHINING one million Norwegian Kroner, A-HA invited SHINING to open for them at their big farewell arena concert on August 21 in Oslo, Norway.

This famed performance of their single "The Madness and the Damage Done" is now finally available on YouTube. See what happened when SHINING won $150,000 in the clip below.

SHINING's Jørgen Munkeby comments on this special event, including being denied the opportunity to perform live: "Due to extreme time restrictions from the TV station, we were denied playing live. We argued until our heads almost fell off, to no avail. But since we play live shows all the time, this was actually a very fun thing for us to do! Then we could instead concentrate on what we were going to have for breakfast the next morning."

Over the course of its impressive 10-year career, SHINING has created its own unique and bizarre hybrid of jazz and extreme metal, which is easily distinguishable from the musical world of their Swedish labelmates sharing the same band name.

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