The earlier Madam Curie music.

Soul Insider ([1997] 2018)

Soul Insider was the culmination of the work of a very young Madam Curie in the 1990s. After years of live concerts and experimental demo recordings, two separate studio sessions were combined into the Soul Insider album.

The 1995 session that produced rocking tracks like “Father’s Blood” featured Christer Andresen (guitars and vocals) and Kjell Vidar Merkesdal (drums) with bassist Arve Uglum. This trio is pictured below, posing in Sogndal, Norway in the summer of 1995. The subsequent 1996 session that produced ambitious songs like “Hostage to Fortune” featured Andresen (guitars, bass and vocals) and Merkesdal (drums) with lead guitarist and part-time bassist Ivar Refsdal.

On the cover of the remastered 2018 edition of Soul Insider, left to right: Arve Uglum, Christer Andresen, Kjell Vidar Merkesdal.

Although a very young band, ages 17 to 20, Madam Curie had by this point made a lasting mark on the music scene of Western Norway. A regional tour with comrades Ulcus (later to morph into Windir and then Vreid) was a performance highlight of this Soul Insider period. However, Madam Curie ultimately folded during the attempt at creating a more professional-sounding follow-up in 1998 to 1999.

The sessions for the Soul Insider album were done at Stovner Rockefabrikk studios in Oslo, Norway. They were engineered and mixed by Bård Norheim and Marius Ryen, and “Falling From Heaven” also features the singing of Helen Hodø. Soul Insider was remastered by Arild Aardalen in 2018 and the track listing consists of 12 songs:

REMEMBERED
FATHER’S BLOOD
MANSIN
LOST FOREVER
TURN TO STONE
I DON’T WANT TO DIE IN DISNEYLAND
FALLING FROM HEAVEN
LEAVING ME INSIDE
CHILD’S CRY
HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE
THE SEASONS CHANGE
DEAD END

You can stream and download Soul Insider wherever you get your digital music.

Turn it up in our SoundCloud and YouTube channels below: