Of Montreal, 08 May

Of Montreal?

Of Montreal, fronted by Kevin Barnes, came for a quick last minute-curated visit to Paris, and gave something like a one and a half hour concert at Point Éphémère. The band from Athens, GA – though coming off at a slow start – successfully managed to make the crowd drip out of sweat (The party’s crashing us) towards the last four or five songs, and that not just only because of the otherwise close to unbearable heat of Paris this evening. New songs from the album ‘Hissing Fauna’ were mixed with mainly the strongest tracks from the past, for example Oslo in the summertime, I was never young, So begins our alabee, all from the brilliant 2004 album ‘The Sunlandic Twins’.

Of Montreal also put on a somewhat unique and refreshing stage show, with men wearing wolf- and Venetian masks, crawling around on stage, sitting on top of each other waving girlandes-sticks, dancing under silvery glittering cloaks and so on in equally fascinating manners (upon being asked of the thought behind it all, Barnes replies, performatively, that ‘more than anything else, it simply looks cool’), effectively or not, placing the crowd in what appears to be an absurd dream.

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An Ålandic pop icon (Debaser 5 May)

For twelve years, the club Sunkit has stubbornly insisted on playing music that has been forgotten, or in best case remembered but ridiquled.

The full interview with the organizers in Swedish here.

For the second time in his career, Sixten Jansson – a.k.a. Pop-sixten – is performing at Debaser, in Stockholm, whereto Sunkit has moved temporarily. Pop Sixten made his break-through with the song ‘Don’t Stop the Music’ in 1980 and has been an icon in his (and my) home island ever since. It can be listened to at his Myspace here (at your own risk).

How do you book an artist to a club that plays pronounced bad music, without insulting the artists?

-We don’t mock the artists, we’re on their side, the organizer and DJ Burt von Bolton explains.

It will be a great show for sure.

-Erik

Festivals in this summer

BESIDES the usual big festival attractions in Scandinavia such as Roskilde and Hultsfred, there are a couple of attractive and unexpected happenings in Finland.

THE main event of the year on my home island is this year better than ever. The Rockoff festival (18-26.7) is always something of a spectacle as our sleepy country-town is filled with buzz. Both an aging Thin Lizzy (what’s left anyway) and Swedish pop-act Håkan Hellström with a newly released album are playing.

THE Porijazz festival (12-20.7) is another festival with some unexpected gems. Besides all the new funk, jazz and R&B, both Tower of Power and Chick Corea are playing. Who would have thought!

FINALLY, Interpol and the National are playing - among with the usual suspects of the Finnish metal scene – at Ruisrock (4-6.7) in Turku.

Erik

Suomalainen Pop-musikka

A recent performance by a not so ambitious indie-pop band (Mecki) raised the question to me: is there a finnish pop-scene, or is it all metal and Sibelius?

I decided to list some of my findings to share my nations recent pop-achievements:

The Friend
The Friend is a melodic indie-pop band from Turku, Finlands second biggest city. They released their first EP “Sports” this August. ‘Back to quitting’ is an all-out indie tune about life. The end result? They have produced some good tunes, reminding me slightly of the Editors, but it’s really nothing new.

Myspace: Link >>

Turku Romantic Movement
Finnish rock, with influences such as the Clash, David Bowie and Iggy & the Stooges. The band was formed in 2006 when they decided to abandon Finnish in favour of English lyrics. Before that they made three albums under the name Turun Romantiikka. Rock, Rhythm & Revolution! was released in 2006 and they are currently working on their second album Noise & Confusion which is to be released in April 11.

“Sweet taste of love” is a typical rock song where influences from groups such as old finnish rock-legends Hanoi Rocks (who released a new album not long a go, some kind of poor Aerosmith imitation) show clearly. They display their more melodical side in “the Classical”, which also brings up unfortunate similarities to Him. Great, but not very innovative.

Myspace: Link >>

Underwater sleeping society

UWSS is a band of six people from different musical backgounds, which also shows in their music, self-described as progressive pop or ‘ambient heavy indie’. They combine dark ambient sounds with melody and a rock n’ roll delivery. All Other Lights Go Out was released last year (2007) and got excellent reviews in the media. Quiet music is a song that strangely enough reminds me of Swedish ‘Bob Hund’ and manifests their strong affiliation with rock. Silence Teaches You How To Sing is another great tune with melodic synths and great vocals.

UWSS is one of the highlights here, one of the bands I’ve come across in my quest that I will try to see live in the future.

Myspace: Link >>

Finnish pop is, with some rare exceptions, tragically behind. What is produced largely resembles what has already been done abroad.

Underwater Sleeping Society brings up hopes that the glory days of progrock in Finland, with Wigwam and Love reckords, might still be resurrected. We might also look into the electronica scene with hope, but that’s a different post.

Erik

Music for grown-ups

Yesterday evening I went to see ‘Music for grown-ups‘ play at Basement Studios in Paris. The venue is, just like it sounds, nothing else than a basement, and one as such with a holding capacity of approximately 100 people; the scene itself can be estimated to taking up one third of the floor; it is lit up by a few ground lights, though the rest of the room falls under a sooty darkness, and the air – muggy; it’s warm, and a bit uncomfortable to be in there. The shortcomings of the venue aside, the atmosphere is great; it is as intimate as nothing I’ve seen before and simply being there feels a bit like a thrill in itself.

Entering the stage, singer John Hughes starts out with mentioning that he’s in a bad mood tonight, and that he won’t be talking very much in between songs; Hughes seems, however, to be the band member in the best mood, seeing the other fours complete reluctance to in any way interact with the audience. Cellist, bass player and guitarist (I am not blaming the drummer too much) are barely even facing the crowd, in fact, barely moving at all. And in contrast to this, Hughes himself does a brilliant job in reaching over the stage; throughout the set, he emanates a strong glow of emotional presence and to some extent, he reminds of Ian Curtis, with the way one can perceivably tell exactly what he is feeling during the songs. The sound of the band, too, seems to be drawing on the post-punk scene, and sounds at times like Joy Division (the song Reprisal) at times like a quieter Interpol (Victorian Letters), and at times just like Jens Lekman (The Drinker). Hughes sings sometimes in falsetto, seemingly to manifest the change of characters throughout the lyrics – or perhaps not: one can’t really tell, seeing as Hughes takes on an almost self-mocking posture as he does this – whatever the case is, it contributes an interesting aspect to the songs, and one has an amusing time interpreting these small signs. The use of a megaphone is another, quite crucial feature on how the songs come across, the sounds emerging from it adding a particularly haunting sensation – perfectly communicating the sense of melancholic loneliness, betrayal and lost love that the lyrics wishes to portray. On an overall, however, Music for grown-ups is an unremarkable, but nevertheless and paradoxically, an interesting band; whichever of the two opposing sides is the strongest, only time will tell – the band may just as easily remain another unknown but talented indieband, as they may achieve wider recognition, and that is also to say, perhaps, how stagnate this scene of music has turned out to seem in recent years.

(On an aside, here’s a quick reflection: as a warm-up act, a fairly anonymous singer/songer-writer known as ‘Yoko’ takes the stage; Yoko’s sound doesn’t surprise anyone, and in all fairness, she sounds just like any other of her kind out there – which makes it interesting to speculate over how many thousands of records she could be selling, had her name been Carla Bruni.)

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La Chanson du Dimanche

I just very recently discovered the Parisian duo ‘La chanson du dimanche’. The two band members, Clément Marchand on guitar, and Alexandre Castagnetti on synthe, releases – just as the group name hints – a new (video recorded) song each Sunday. The songs are simple and humorous, very often extremely catchy, and you will most probably like them a lot, whether you know French or not.

Find La Chanson du Dimanche on MySpace and give it a couple of listenings.

The band performing the song Petit Cheminot.

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Le Dokidoki Festival, day three out of three – ‘Antilles’ et ‘Felix Kubin’

The third and last day of Le Dokidoki Festival, tonights performances being George Odjik, Lokai, B.I.A.S., Felix Kubin and Antilles.

Listening to ‘Antilles’ is like listening to an ocean of noise, like being inside of a metal factory and still, this bedlam of sound manages to behave rhythmically. It’s hypnotizing, the drummers frenetic pounding, the awkward mixing, the screaming guitar. The performance is one uninterrupted set, and it keeps the audience enchanted and right on their spot. ‘Antilles’ has an unconventional approach to electronic music; the haunting dissonance and the delirious, trance-inducing repetitions are more than what your average listener is expected to handle – the sound of traffic and everyday noise is, according to their own words, something that provokes the band into creating. Central figure of the band, or perhaps he isn’t, Erik Minkkinen, is the creator of the ‘Placard Headphone Festival‘ that started out as something like an experiment in ‘99, lasting for 72 hours, welcoming 6 guests at a time to his electronics-filled apartment – now, nearly a decade later, it is spanning over three months and taking place in various cities all over the world.

Luckily, I was given a couple of minutes to talk to him about Antilles.

What is Antilles?

“Antilles is a three-man project, and we have another band with two of the guitarist from a band called Sister Iodine, kind of a very old thing, and the drummer is from a band called Berg Sans Nipples, so it’s kind of a reunion of people that worked in different places.”

What are you doing on stage?

“We are trying to do very rhythmical music, but with a noise element. And with this drummer, who obviously has a large part of our sound, it brings something extra, and also seeing as he’s a bit of a multi-instrumentalist.”

Where does it all come from, you must have some source of inspiration? Listening to the gig, one has the feeling of being inside of a metal factory, it’s all very hypnotizing. Explain.

“That’s the idea. The idea of the project is to make something quite hypnotic, trance-like, noise. We are looking for a kind of powerful trance… if we are in this Dokidoki thing, its mainly because of this other project that we have, that we released a track on a compilation for, and that project is not really possible to bring over and…”

But what’s the main thought behind your creation?

“This project is very improvised, very in the sense of that we just define a line, and tonight was definitely very improvised, the line was broken from one bit to the other, but sometimes it can get more straight. ‘Antilles’ is dense music, it’s trance but non-religious, perhaps trans-communist… a manifesto against religious trance, I think that’s what it is.”

The slightly enigmatic nature of the answers above leaves me with the conclusion that the music of ‘Antilles’ is undefined until the point where it reaches the ears of listeners; it is not as much about the ideas before its creation, as it is about the ideas given birth to during it.

For an overwhelming listening experience, look into the MyOWNspace of ‘Antilles’.

 

Antilles

Up on stage after ‘Antille’ is Felix Kubin, and his gig is an extremely interesting one. Monotonous rhythms drawing one’s attention to military marches shifts place with a slightly apocalyptic, doom dreading futuristic sound, just to shift again to what must labeled as ‘cirkus-electronica’, with the grand effect of, in my opinion, portraying 20th century history from the perspective of the oppressed, looking up to authoritarian rulers. Kubin is dressed in a grey suit, a green shirt and red tie, and he moves around on stage as freely as he can, bursting out in quick dance moves every now and then. Kubin’s music seems at times to be satirising on history, but at times to be plainly sad, upset and angry – an anger which takes a slightly absurd form; on the outside a spitefully laughing face, on the inside a scared child. The second to last song is ‘There is a garden (full of beauty)’ and though Kubin isn’t exactly a superb singer, his total emotional dedication and the beautiful stream of electronic currents makes it an absolutely wonderful performance; Kubin reaches the audience with so much feeling that it is impossible not feel, and not to like it.

Felix Kubin with a rose, during ‘There is a garden’

Kubin performing ‘Hit me provider‘

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The Dokidoki Festival in Paris, day two out of three – Kumisolo, Chris Club, Don Nino and Tujiko Noriko.

Dokidoki is a congregation of mainly Paris-based electro-pop artists, and during an ongoing three day period – under the catchphrase ‘I regret not having kissed’ – the association arranges a music festival at the Point Éphémère.

The venue holds approximately 300 people, and when I arrive, Tujiko Noriko has just gone on stage as the second act of the evening. In the beginning, Tujiko live sounds just like Tujiko in the studio. It’s the kind of music that makes your mind wander in and out of different worlds, harmonious yet broken up, raw yet gentle. My thoughts are drawn to Björk and Sigur Ros, and I wonder, if this musn’t be their Japanese equivalents. Towards the last couple of songs, a seemingly anonymous DJ joins Tujiko on stage, and from there the songs take on a slightly more psychedelic tone, a more industrially hard hammering of hypnotically disquieting noise. The audience stands completely still throughout the performance, on occasions perhaps screwing uncomfortably, but Tujiko receives applause after each song, and she does deserve it.

Tujiko Noriko

When I go outside during the break after Tujiko’s performance, I get to hear that I had arrived just after Chris Club had finished their gig. Slightly disappointed, having wanted to see them in particular, I do, however, speaking of devil, run into the bands singer a little later during the night, and I manage to grab hold of her for a one minute conversation. When explaining the bands music, she answers that “our music is a promulgation of our photography. The photography that we do aims to portray the beauty of the most normal and basic forms, like landscapes for example. Photography inspires us to express something through music” after which there seems nothing more to say, and we excuse ourselves.

 

The next artist up on stage is Don Nino, and his performance is, in lack of a better word, memorable. Describing the gig seems difficult, the musical versatility of it making it difficult to classify and categorise. Don Nino navigates between rhythms, a cacophony of introspective monochrome, and a consciousness-expanding harshness. After the gig I am, lo and behold, allowed to run back behind the stage and have a five minute chat with Don Nino.

Amazing gig. Would you describe what has inspired you to make this kind of music?

“The last record is a cover record, so pretty self-explanatory. But what regards our music before that, well, I grew up in America, so the American independence thing is important to me, but also to a very large degree Syd Barret, and Pink Floyd during that time when they were mainly under his influence. We also take inspiration from afrobeat music, and very very ethnic music – that is a very large part of my background, mainly repetitive music, and as you saw, I use looping on stage.”

Your live performance tonight doesn’t sound like anything I’ve heard in a very long time. It was remarkably different from the studio version of your songs. Explain, please.

“On stage, it’s an interaction between me and the drummer, it’s kind of like a free-flow – every night’s going to be a different gig. The process of playing these songs are that I’m going loop my guitar, then arrange the loop with vocals, and then a gimmick and then sing, again, without doing anything with my hands, so in some ways it bears resemblance with what we do in a studio, but now its very much about live energy… for example the ‘Like a Virgin’ cover that we did tonight, we’ve never done that before, this was the first time on stage, so I mean, every time is going sound a bit different, depending on how we feel about that nights venue”.

 

Don Nino, MySpace

Last out for the night is Kumisolo, the gig that makes the least impression on me. Kumisolo’s high scaled nintendo-pop provokes parts of the audience to some sporadic dance moves, but in whole, she doesn’t quite manage to reach over the stage. The gig bores me, and I don’t bother to stay until the end.

Kumisolo

Dokidoki MySpace

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Dokidoki France

 

The Teenagers, still young?

It all started with three french guys and a fake Myspace homepage, but before they knew it they were recordring the bogus lyrics they had posted. The Teenagers have since been signed on Merok (who also launched Klaxons) and are finally releasing their first album, Reality Check.

The album begins with the song that caught our attention last year, Homecomming. Even though the lyrics are rude and filled with foul language (I fucked my American cunt), the cute French accent, or maybe the humour in their lyrics, fools you enough to make you sing along to it. They follow up by more two-chord drone-pop in Love No, a song about bad relationships, and keep on going in pretty much the same way throughout the whole album. A highlight further on is Fuck Nicole, a song dedicated to their first Myspace poster, and French Kiss, whose soft lyrics and simple rhymes are catchy as hell.

The three London based parisians make catchy copulation-pop (as described in Swedish media) about what goes on in their lives with great humour and a desire to present their thoughts as they come to them, without rewriting or editing. This creates a special sound where content and humour matters more than style and melody.

The question for later is, how do you make a second album in this style without repeating yourself?

The Teenagers Myspace: Link>>

Erik

Maximum Black 290208

The other night I was at the Final Fantasy-curated and headlined Maximum Black mini-festival, amusingly sponsored by Vienna Public Utility (read about it here). The festival was fine, most bands were of the indie/alternative scene and all hand-picked by Owen Pallet. The odd one out was the Stephen O’Malley & Alexander Tucker Duo, performing 40-minutes of drone using electric guitar, cello and vocals. The duo was completely misplaced among the other bands but had at least one thing going for them; their video projections. Two screens showed clips of chemical and magnetic reactions, boiling and evaporating liquids and magnetism shaping and re-shaping iron dust. The videos suited the eery mood of the music and the music became symbolic of chemical and physical reactions and it got kind of exciting to imagine the music as a sometimes liquid, sometimes solid; boiling and reshaping. It made you look for some sorts of shapes within what could easily be discarded as random noise and created a way to approach the piece. Too bad that most of the audience was not as open/pretentiously minded (or perhaps just imaginative) as me; the reaction to the concert was (obviously) confusion and ironic applauds.

Owen Pallett had another form of projections during his show, a friend had created an overhead projector-based slide-show to illustrate the vague conceptual theme of the concert, 8 Schools Of Magic (the same theme the record is based on). The slides were nice drawings imaginatively assembled and layered with colors and details, f.ex. showing a medieval town with it’s citizens and a black-and-white forest slowly being colorized by added layers of OH-papers. This could be an overhead version of Owen Pallett’s songs; layers of OH-paper together create a complete image, as Pallett’s recorded and replayed violin-loops build up to detailed songs. Overall though, the projections mostly just added to the fun of the show. It did not necessarily have the (possible) depth of the previous act but it’s nice to see any artist try to add something extra to a concert other than the music.

AS