VOICE. FABRIC. TRANSFORMATION

Projects · 2014–2017

• The Jist (2014)
• Morning Has Occurred (2014)
• Pieces of Solitude (2015)
• Cokko (2016)
• Freedom Nation (2017)

Honours

• 2016 — Sparebank 1 Jazz Talent, Moldejazz

Her voice often feels woven rather than projected.

Natalie Sandtorv moves between genres the way others move between emotions — without apology, without borders. Known for her work across jazz, experimental music, and contemporary composition, her voice carries both restraint and rupture.

Across more than a decade, she has worked between solo projects, duo collaborations and full bands — moving from free improvisations to synth-driven pop under the name Neon Ion.

RM : When you sing, do you think in terms of texture, weight or material?

N : Absolutely. I have always been very obsessed with the physical qualities of my voice. Around the age of 19, I would record myself constantly, listening back and analysing every sound, texture, breath and timbre. I would write down everything I heard and think about how I could change it or make it more expressive.

That work became even more profound when I met my producer Erlend Mokkelbost, when I moved to Oslo, around ten years ago. Together we explored all the different dynamics within my voice, and I learned how little output I sometimes need to create the strongest expression. It is still a challenge. Sometimes it feels like trying to control a hundred wild horses running in completely different directions. But when I manage to bring them together, I can capture all those different dimensions at once. That is the feeling I am always looking for.

A voice may reveal an instinct, but instinct alone does not yet make an artistic world. Between 2018 and 2019, her language began to gather texture. Collaboration, studio work and performance became the threads from which a more recognisable identity could be woven. The voice was no longer only being discovered. It was becoming material.

Experience becomes thread. Collaboration becomes stitch. Performance becomes silhouette. The stage becomes an atelier.

Conceptual Framing

For us, Neon Ion is approached not as a "musician who wears clothes," but as a living composition, where voice, garment, movement, and silence coexist.

Her voice often feels architectural when we are listening to her songs — layered, fragile, intentional.

RM : What role does vulnerability play in your vocal expression? Is it a choice or a consequence?

N: To me, music without vulnerability doesn't move me. The music I want to perform and listen to needs to have something at stake, something to fight for, some kind of nerve or emotional risk.

But I think vulnerability can also be a consequence. Sometimes I'll write a topline for a producer who wants to make something really clubby or happy, and somehow I still end up sounding sad, no matter what I do. So maybe it's just embedded in me. Probably some daddy issues or something. Haha.

I think I've stopped trying to fight that part of myself. It's probably where some of the truth in my voice comes from.

RM : Do you experience your body as an instrument, a canvas, or both?

N: I've never really worked with movement or dance, unfortunately. My intention on stage has mostly been to reach a point where the energy of the room and the audience takes over my body, and where I can enter an almost euphoric state of mind.

At the same time, I've never felt particularly comfortable in my own body. I spend a lot of time trying to cover up or hide, which is probably connected to the stress I sometimes experience on stage. Sometimes I joke that I should have been a bass player, I want to be on stage, but I don't necessarily want to be the centre of attention. I just want to play. Maybe that's also where my love for clothing comes from. If I'm wearing something beautiful, strange or completely crazy, then the clothes become the focus rather than me. It gives me another way of expressing myself without having to feel so exposed.

Fashion as Language · Voice as Textile

When we look at you across several performances and events during your career, we see fabric framed as second skin, as protection, as expression and as transformation during your journeys.

RM: Is vulnerability something you wear deliberately, or something that exposes you regardless — like a garment, or does it wear you? Are there particular designers, materials or silhouettes that feel connected to your sound world?

N: I've always been in love with the Italian brand Etro. They have this bohemian, almost queen-like quality, beautiful, strong patterns, silky fabrics and big, flowing silhouettes that make you want to float around barefoot on old wooden floors. That feeling is very connected to how I want to feel on stage.

Last year in Berlin I bought an amazing yellow floral set by Kristin Verita Katzer, a really cool designer living there. I love wearing it on stage. I was also lucky enough to meet Kaja Bremnes a few years ago. She has made several custom pieces for me, including two corsets that are incredibly beautiful. She's a gem.

And then there's Gucci, which I have a slight obsession with. I go to their outlet in Italy almost once a year and allow myself one piece, maybe two. Haha. To me, it feels a little like wearing art. I think that's ultimately what I love about clothing, it can become part of the artistic expression, almost like another material I get to work with.

Watch, Listen and Feel · 2018–2021

• "Fears," feat. Martin Vinje (piano), Øra Studio, Trondheim — 2018
• Lovers Live — 2019
• Living Room Sessions — 2020
• Beat for Beat, NRK1, Dec 2021 — cover of Frank Ocean's "Thinking About You"

Her first single, "Portman" from the album Heart Echoes, marked the emergence of Neon Ion — a moment when years of experimentation, collaboration and experience began to converge into a distinct artistic universe.

On the island of Giske, surrounded by the shifting landscape of Norway's west coast, lies Ocean Sound Recordings. It was here, alongside recording engineer Henning Svoren, that Natalie and her band spent a week transforming sketches into material for her second album in 2019.

Rebirth for Natalie is not a moment. It is a condition. A slow negotiation between what has been worn thin and what is yet to be shaped.

We first encountered this transformation through the recordings, but it became unmistakable when we saw her perform at the Oslo release concert for Laugh Now, Cry Later on January 30th 2026. Stage, voice, body, musicianship and image no longer appeared as separate elements. They had become one language.

RM : Throughout this conversation, we've explored your journey through three chapters: Voice, Fabric and Transformation. Looking back today, where do you feel you stand within that journey? And what still remains to be woven?

N : I feel like I'm somewhere in the middle of it, I guess. And actually, that feels like a nice place to be. Starting out is the hardest, even though sometimes I miss being young, naive and completely obsessed with practising. Now I feel like I've carved out some projects and works that I'm really proud of, and I have the confidence that I'm capable of creating something from my own vision. That's a powerful feeling.

But I'm also always a little scared that the inspiration will dry up, or that I'll create something bad, as we sometimes do. The critic in me is constantly at work. Having experienced losing my hearing in one ear, I've also felt the very real fear of losing everything, of losing the possibility of being a musician and composer. For a moment, I saw that life disappear right in front of me. It gave me a different perspective: I have to do this while I can, because tomorrow it might be gone.

So maybe what still needs to be woven is learning to trust the process and the state of things more, and to trust that there will always be something new to discover.

Projects · 2020–2026

• Heart Echoes — 2020, Jazzland Recordings
• Mood Cosmic — 2022, Jazzland Recordings
• Orbits — 2024
• Bad Mantras (EP) — 2025
• Blood Red Sky — Orbits, 2026
• Laugh Now, Cry Later — 2026, Jazzland Recordings

Honours

• 2025 — NOPA's Music Prize for 2024, with Orbits, for the track "Synthetic Sweetness"
• 2026 — Nominated, Musikkforleggerprisen, Breakthrough of the Year
• 2026 — Nominated, Spellemannprisen 2025, R&B and Soul category, with Orbits for Blood Red Sky

Personal Transformation

Natalie Sandtorv's third album as Neon Ion, out this year on Jazzland Recordings.

RM : You have spoken publicly about a deeply personal period involving the path toward parenthood and sudden hearing loss. Did that experience alter your relationship with listening, silence or your own voice — and how much of that transformation found its way into Laugh Now, Cry Later?

N: It changed me in a big way, both as a person and as a musician. I became much more sensitive to sound. Loud rooms, traffic and even conversations in busy bars can be overwhelming, so I've had to change the way I move through the world, I go out less, spend less time in noisy environments, and sometimes choose completely different ways of getting from one place to another. My hearing is still very sensitive, and after a concert my ears can ring for days. I also don't sing with the same force I used to. I've become much more aware of how much sound I actually need to create an expression. In that sense, it definitely softened some of the edges in my voice and in my music.

At the same time, concerts are still something I absolutely love. When I get completely lost in the music, I can still let go and sing with everything I have. So I think Laugh Now, Cry Later carries both sides of that experience, a greater sensitivity to sound, but also a deeper appreciation for the moments when I can surrender to it.

The third Neon Ion album, Laugh Now, Cry Later, still offers quite magnificent and cleverly thought-out R&B with a jazz sprinkle, but here too there is a radical personal turn in the material.

Future Direction

RM: Continuity and evolution. What are you currently unlearning? What kind of artist do you hope to become — not in sound, but in spirit?

N: I feel like I'm in a strange and quite curious place at the moment. I'm making new music and still figuring out where it belongs, which stages it belongs on, and whose ears it is for. In a way, I think I'm unlearning the need to have those answers immediately.

I would love to become a more confident and secure artist, someone who trusts her own expression more fully. I've experienced moments of being very uncomfortable on stage, and I think there are still things I need to work through there. But when I listen to the music I'm making now, I feel very strongly that this is where I belong. That feeling has been with me since I was a kid. I've never really felt normal and I've never needed to be. But I sometimes feel that the world today leaves less space for people who choose a different path. We're so focused on money, status, productivity and fitting into these neat, square lives, and anything outside those norms can seem strange.

I strongly believe that every person is born with some kind of pull towards what they do. For me, making music has always felt less like a choice and more like something I have to do. That doesn't make it easy. Anything you dedicate your life to can tear you apart at times. But there's something magical about feeling that this is what I'm supposed to be doing, even when it's difficult.

I've also fallen more in love with the process itself, writing, arranging, producing, being in the studio and shaping something from the very beginning. At the same time, concerts remain one of my pillars in life. I get incredibly excited about them. What I'm always searching for on stage is almost a ritualistic state of mind, a space where the band and the audience become completely locked into the same energy, where everyone is simply in it. Almost like a meditative state.

So maybe the artist I hope to become is someone who can move freely between those worlds: curious and playful in the process, but deeply present and trusting when it's time to share the music.

To listen to Neon Ion is to encounter restraint as strength. There is no urgency to resolve, no demand to explain. Her music and lyrics remind us that transformation does not require destruction — only attention.

In a time that insists on visibility, she chooses presence. In a culture of acceleration, she insists on slowness. Fashion, sound, and silence meet here as parallel practices — all shaped by the voice and the body, all marked by time.

To attend a Natalie Sandtorv concert is to enter a space somewhere between a church and a conversation with an old friend. There is something sacred in the experience, yet profoundly human. Nothing feels imposed. Nothing asks for attention. You arrive as you are and leave slightly altered.

Her voice does not simply travel above the music; it inhabits it. It folds itself around the ensemble like silk through architecture, gathering the instruments into a shared emotional atmosphere before finding its way into the body.

At times, she seems less like a singer than a messenger. The sound carries memory, longing and wonder from one place to another. When the final note disappears, what remains is not only the recollection of a performance, but the feeling of having been quietly guided somewhere deeper within yourself.

Natalie Sandtorv does not present transformation as the act of becoming someone new. She reveals it as the courage to continue — refined, reconfigured and intact.