Unsongs is a remarkable collection of songs that have, at one stage, been banned, censored or silenced. The attempts to suppress them were as mild as an airplay ban and as brutal as murder. With great sensitivity and imagination, Norwegian singer-songwriter Moddi has given them new life and created a moving and eye-opening album.

Unsongs simultaneously celebrates the censored and exposes the censors. Pål Moddi Knutsen, a 29-year-old from northern Norway, was an activist before he was a songwriter. As a member of Socialist Youth and Young Friends of the Earth, he realized that the songs they sang were decades old. "Beautiful songs but they don't correspond to the reality we live in now," he says.

In January 2014, Moddi cancelled a concert in Tel Aviv in protest of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories. On his website, he wrote "silence can sometimes be stronger than music". After the cancellation, Norwegian singer Birgitte Grimstad contacted Moddi to tell him about "Eli Geva," a song about an Israeli officer who refused to lead his forces into Beirut during the Lebanon War in 1982. Geva became an icon of the peace movement, but also a reviled man among those who supported the war.

Fired with inspiration, Moddi made his own version of "Eli Geva." When he performed the song, he noticed that it called forth strong emotions within the audience. "People reacted to it in a completely different way than my usual songs," he says. "I had people leave the room because they disagreed with the content of the lyrics. I had people crying because they remembered the war. It was so strange to realize that one short song can contain so much history."

From a list of more than 400 songs, Moddi decided to translate and rework 12 for the album. The only rule was that the element of the song which caused it to be suppressed had to remain intact, even when translated into English and with a different arrangement and melody. The stories on Unsongs span continents and centuries. They are as recent as "Punk Prayer" and as ancient as "The Shaman and the Thief," a 19th-century folk song from Norway's aggressively assimilated indigenous Sami culture, performed here with the celebrated Sami singer Mari Boyne.