On your website you picture “how it all started,” the image of a few keyboards, laptops, instruments and pedals.  What is different now, almost 7 years later?

 

Yes, well, our music started out being much more improvisation based: guitar, bass, keyboards, effect pedals and laptop trickery.  We would get together and just try to come up with cool sounds and structures.  For instance, our first two albums, or I should say demos (we just made a few cd-r's), were practically 100% improvised, Eivind would work with the improv later in Protools, shape it, and do some editing.  But for the most part, the albums were improvised sessions.  There was still melodic material and pieces that resembled songs, so we've always tried to have a melodic streak.  As we kept working together, our process became much more composed and deliberate. Nowadays we will usually compose a song before we even start experimenting with the computer, gear, or recording. We bounce song ideas back and forth, a lot of time it's sequencer files, and then we start recording and trying to find the right vibe, instruments and sounds.  However, we're always trying to change up the way we work as to not get stuck in patterns.

 

 

Your songs often paint a picture for the listener.  How does this notion relate to your writing and recording processes? Your live show?

 

We do try to paint a picture for the listener.  We are inspired by movie soundtracks, photography, and different kinds of art, and we definitely try to let these things seep into our musical imaginations.  Our live shows are quite different from our records; when we play live we have help from three friends covering drums, keyboards and trumpet/laptop.  We feel the live shows have been taking on a different kind of energy lately and the improv stuff definitely plays a bigger role in our live setting. As far as visuals we have played with the thought of adding image projections of some sort to our live shows, but we think this is something that needs to be really strong and fitting in order to add to the overall thing so we haven't been stressing this.

 

From what I can tell, your new material is a bit more open, it sounds like there is more space for things to happen in. Tell me all about your new record “A Dream I Used to Remember.” What are your favorite things about it?

 

With the new album, we attempted to have more memorable, song-like themes or it kinda just happened that way since we had a lot of themes and songs ready before we started recording. We feel it is our most thematically focused album to date where each songs complements and leads to the next and the whole record plays down like a story. We were able to record some different/better instruments with this latest one too, which was exciting for us.  We came across a really old banjo that we enjoyed recording, we got to record with some really nice guitar amplifiers, some cool spring reverbs and tape delays, and also some new instruments for us (a farfisa, and an old hammond solovox). We also had a small female choir added to some of the tunes.  Eivind always had a love for the sound of the vocal choirs in the music of the 30s and 40s.  For example, some of the old Disney soundtracks have this quality that we like.  This was the sound we tried to recapture, maybe most evident on the song "Swimming Back Into the Picture".  Overall I think this is our strongest album, but that's pretty normal I guess.  Most bands are always the happiest with their last effort, which is the way it should be in a creative and evolving environment.

 

You’ve also recently accompanied some of your music with video.  Tell me a little bit about the videos you’ve done...

 

These are videos Eivind has made.  They are basically reworked old 8-mm films taken from Eivind's childhood, "The Last Country Village" is footage from a winter cabin in Norway in the 70s , the other one is a play-doh stop animation film from the early 80s which fit nicely with the title track from our last record "A Dream I Used to Remember". We can't really afford to pay anyone to make us videos so we figured we make a few ourselves.  It's been fun.  We think they came out pretty good and fit the vibe of the songs, although it would be fun to have other people do music videos for us in the future