A guitar’s farewell: the intimate sorrows of TOMBEAUX

A haunted landscape of strings and silence. 

Some albums reach for perfection; others reach for something much harder to grasp, truth. Christina Sandsengen’s TOMBEAUX is firmly in the latter camp. It doesn’t offer escapism or distraction. It invites you to listen closely, to sit with discomfort, and to feel. And for those willing to accept the invitation, it’s a deeply moving, unforgettable experience.

At first glance, TOMBEAUX might seem like a minimalist project: just a classical guitar, a few original compositions, and no frills. But beneath its sparse instrumentation lies an emotional weight that hits harder than most full orchestras. This is not background music. It’s a slow unraveling. A confession whispered in the dark.

What makes it particularly striking is how modern it feels despite its reverence for the past. The tombeau as a musical form dates back to the 17th century, when composers like Froberger and Couperin wrote elegies for their departed friends. Christina revives that lineage not through imitation but through essence, by returning to the idea that music can act as both memorial and meditation. It’s a dialogue between centuries, spoken softly across the gulf of time.

The tombeau has always carried dual meanings: remembrance and reinvention. It is both a lament and a challenge, asking the living to transform grief into structure. In Christina’s hands, the Baroque lineage becomes a living dialogue with mortality. She doesn’t reconstruct the past; she reinterprets its purpose, to show that mourning can be creative, not merely commemorative.

The album’s name, Tombeaux, French for “tombs”, isn’t poetic abstraction. It’s literal. The entire album was recorded inside the Emanuel Vigeland mausoleum in Oslo, a space designed for silence, reflection, and mourning. Its acoustics are naturally haunting: every note lingers, stretches, and fades like the memory of a voice you can’t quite recall. It’s not just a setting, it becomes part of the music. And that’s essential, because this album is about grief.

Inside that mausoleum, music behaves differently. The air is thick with reverberation, and every plucked string multiplies into a ghostly choir. Notes merge into one another until it becomes difficult to tell where the guitar ends and the room begins. That blurred boundary turns sound into presence, as if the space itself is responding, echoing back the emotion that summoned it. Few recordings manage to capture environment as collaborator, yet here, architecture becomes empathy.

Christina has dedicated TOMBEAUX to the memory of loved ones lost too soon. But it’s not a sentimental tribute. It’s raw. The pieces don’t romanticize death or offer comfort, they reflect the jagged, quiet chaos of real mourning. The kind you can’t explain to others. The kind that sits quietly in your chest for years.

This honesty is perhaps what makes the album so arresting. In a culture that commodifies grief, that turns tragedy into spectacle or filters it through cinematic melancholy, TOMBEAUX refuses the easy catharsis. It doesn’t tell you to move on. It lets the listener linger in the unresolved, where pain and beauty coexist. That courage, to remain with what hurts, is what elevates the music from remembrance to revelation.

Listening to TOMBEAUX alone feels almost ritualistic. The experience draws you inward until the sense of time begins to blur. You start to notice your own breathing aligning with the reverb, the slow decay of sound mirroring thought itself. It’s music that doesn’t unfold in minutes, but in moments of awareness. It gives shape to something wordless, the stillness we try to avoid but secretly crave.

Her playing is intimate, sometimes even fragile. Unlike the bombastic tendencies of many modern classical guitarists, Christina’s strength lies in her restraint. She allows space to breathe. She resists the urge to fill every moment with flourish. The silences are as important as the sound. You can hear her fingers shift on the strings, the weight of her hand returning to the fretboard, the quiet reverberation of the room, it’s all part of the experience. It's less a performance and more an act of remembrance.

The emotional range she conveys with so few notes borders on cinematic. There are moments of tension that feel like inhaled grief, others where a single harmonic seems to hold back tears. The guitar, stripped of ornamentation, becomes almost human, flawed, hesitant, trembling under the weight of memory. Every imperfection becomes testimony to presence, a trace of the living reaching toward the lost.

There’s something profoundly human about the imperfections that remain in the recordings. A subtle buzz here, a slightly uneven chord there, and yet it makes the album feel more alive. The guitar becomes less of an instrument and more of a vessel. A voice for something that words can’t carry.

What’s especially powerful is how TOMBEAUX resists classification. It doesn’t aim to fit into a “neoclassical” label or appeal to a commercial niche. It’s deeply personal work, perhaps even difficult at times, but that’s exactly why it matters. There’s honesty here, and in today’s polished, market-ready musical landscape, that’s a radical act in itself.

It’s also a reminder that vulnerability remains the final frontier of artistic expression. In an era obsessed with perfection, auto-tuned, edited, optimized, TOMBEAUX stands as a quiet rebellion. It asks the listener to lean in, to tolerate imperfection, and to rediscover emotion not as spectacle but as truth. Few artists today are brave enough to make something this unguarded.

And the compositions… they carry a beautiful tension between form and feeling. There are no gimmicks, no posturing. Just notes, each of them placed with care, often with sadness, and sometimes with love. Christina isn’t just writing music; she’s carving out spaces where emotion can exist without explanation.

What separates TOMBEAUX from countless intimate recordings is the precision with which silence is handled. The pacing of each note feels deliberate, architectural, like light filtered through stained glass. Christina’s phrasing evokes both control and surrender, as if she’s negotiating with time itself. Each pause becomes a boundary between worlds: the living and the remembered, the sound and the echo.

In the end, TOMBEAUX doesn’t offer closure, but maybe that’s the point. Grief has no conclusion. It changes form, it fades, but it never quite disappears. And this album, like the mausoleum it was recorded in, is a space where that truth is acknowledged and honored.

Christina Sandsengen has created something rare: a work of art that is not afraid of silence, stillness, or sorrow. In TOMBEAUX, she reminds us that music’s deepest power lies not in volume or virtuosity, but in vulnerability. It’s not an easy listen. It’s not meant to be. But for those who’ve ever stood before their own unspoken grief, it might just feel like coming home.

If you can give it a try, have a listen to album here: too.fm/tombeaux