Paper DJ Tag Team

Since lockdown the concept of online clubbing has taken off, often with unsatisfactory results. We like watching the back of a middle aged-man DJing in his laundry as much as there next person but the novelty has worn off now. Clubbing is about interaction, fun and being in the moment so in that spirit, here’s the “Paper DJ Tag Team”.

We asked our friends and family to film themselves playing three tracks, continuing on from the previous DJ in a digital back to back. It begins with Flash Atkins warming things up in his kitchen followed by Ed Mahon rocking his man cave, who knows what Leon Sweet is doing but by God he’s having fun, Danny Russell digs deep in Berlin while Leeds’ most finest selector Reeshy rocks a disco fuelled by a large glass of wine and dancing shoes. Crazy P’s Danielle Moore has her own loft party, Hot Toddy needs to tidy his room and Kimo performs musical surgery. By the end the night its peak time, roof raising scenes as Kim Lana and Julie Wills are in full party mode in what could well be day two of a three day rave-a-thon.

A new concept in clubbing?

Probably not.. . More fun than you can shake a light stick at?

Most certainly!

Memoirs from Norway’s underground dance pioneers: Andy Swatland #7

Travelling around Norway in the Spring is a fantastic experience. During my trip in 2013, we hooked up with the key movers and shakers involved in forming the country’s house and disco scenes. I was lucky enough to touch down in Oslo, Bergen and Tromsø, and many weird and beautiful places in the surrounding areas. I travelled with Ben Davis, who was directing the film we were working on, formed from interviews with the key people from the dance scene plus Paper Recording’s label artists such as Those Norwegians. We were also curious about the country, geography, and people and how they influenced each other’s creative passions. This film had a working title of ‘Northern Disco Lights – The Rise and Rise of Norwegian House Music’. During our visit, we spoke to as many of the DJs, producers, promoters and radio stations as we could and decided to publish these best bits that sum up the trip, the film and our findings.

Andy Swatland was manager of Rocky Platebar [record shop] in Tromsø, he now lives in Kristiansand, Norway with his family. 

Where did you first get into electronic music in the UK or Norway and how?
I had been travelling as an international DJ for about 3 years visiting Denmark, Germany, France, Luxembourg and my agent asked if I fancied gigging in Norway? It sounded like fun, so I agreed and ended resident DJ for a club called Jonas which was based at the SAS Royal Hotel (now the Radisson). A friend of mine ran a small record/video department in Tonofoto AS who moved to Tønsberg and recommended me for his position, I then became a resident of Tromsø.

Rocky Platebar Record bag

Rocky Platebar Record bag

Where did you buy your dance imports?
As a DJ, I was surprised how behind the Norwegian record stores were regarding new, trending music and saw a business opportunity. I got in contact with a wholesaler in Manchester called Streetbeat and started importing 12” singles. These were pretty much non-existent in Tromsø. Streetbeat had all the latest stuff such as Depeche Mode, Human League, Japan, Scritti Politti, Duran Duran and Frankie Goes to Hollywood plus the latest remixes. Some albums were released earlier in other countries (e.g. The Smiths, The Cure, Yello), so I imported these as well. I also imported ADDA DJ cases for the DJs, all of whom used to get their vinyl from me. At Rocky’s, Per was a regular customer, as was Rune.

What radio station/shows were people listening to?
Pretty much the only radio station at the time was Radio Luxembourg. I did a couple of gigs with Tony Prince & Mark Wesley from the station while in Denmark. Student radio took off and I had a two hour Saturday show for a called Rocky Radio to help promote my shop; Rocky Platebar (Records).

What genre was the most popular, disco, house or techno?
Disco was mainstream, while Techno and House were more niche genres. Per and Rune, both great guys and were pioneers in Tromsø and were on the cutting-edge of electronic dance.

Per Martinsen buying tunes in Rocky's Platebar, Tromsø

Andy Swatland’s record shop Rocky’s Platebar circa 1988, can you see Per Martinsen?

 

These excerpts were taken from a Facebook Messenger interview conducted as part of the research for the Northern Disco Lights feature documentary film.

© Paper Vision Ltd (Pete Jenkinson/Ben Davis)

Recorded on a Zoom H2.

Transcribed by Fingertips, Louie Callegari and Tongue Tied.

Memoirs from Norway’s underground dance pioneers: Hans T. Zeiner-Henriksen #5

Travelling around Norway in the Spring is a fantastic experience. During my trip in 2013, we hooked up with the key movers and shakers involved in forming the country’s house and disco scenes. I was lucky enough to touch down in Oslo, Bergen and Tromsø, and many weird and beautiful places in the surrounding areas. I travelled with Ben Davis, who was directing the film we were working on, formed from interviews with the key people from the dance scene plus Paper Recording’s label artists such as Those Norwegians. We were also curious about the country, geography, and people and how they influenced each other’s creative passions. This film had a working title of ‘Northern Disco Lights – The Rise and Rise of Norwegian House Music’. During our visit, we spoke to as many of the DJs, producers, promoters and radio stations as we could and decided to publish these best bits that sum up the trip, the film and our findings.

Hans T. Zeiner-Henriksen is Associate Professor, Department of Musicology at University of Oslo

Hi Hans, how are Norwegians regarded by the rest of the world? I think we’re seen as a safe area of the world, calm and safe, a bit outside. Our economy is very good it’s an expensive country because of our oil resources so it’s an easy place to be.

Do you think the discovery of the oil changed how Norway thinks about itself? Well yes, it’s been a long time now since the oil, we started getting oil resources and during these years we have kind of grown from being similar to other European countries to have this strong economy. Especially in the last decade, we don’t have any economic problems.

Do you think it’s affected Norwegian creativity? Yes, if you grow up in a country in a situation where you feel that things are going to go well, you don’t really have to stress too much to survive; it’s then that you can move into more creative work.

Do you think Norwegian music has certain characteristics? That depends on what you label on each music because it comes in a lot of sizes and a lot of shapes. I think if you consider Norwegian music as Norwegian folk music then it will have different instruments, the Hardanger fiddle which is local to Norway. The music that you would play on that instrument has travelled from other countries and been influenced by other cultures. Classical music was important at the end of the 19th century and so it was important for building the Norwegian identity. We said goodbye to Denmark and then Sweden and became our own nation. It was important that we had not only the music but the literature, the theatre, all the things that became an important part of Norwegian-ness. At that time, it was considered that this music was Norwegian and that it has something that is specifically Norwegian about it. A lot of us, growing up in Norway would consider classical music as very Norwegian, maybe because we had already heard it played alongside landscape footage in films. We have also heard it with Norwegian fairy tales and those connections are very strong. When you refer to Norwegian Jazz or popular music it’s difficult because there are so many influences and today you can just switch on your device and get the whole world into your living room.

Why do you think Norwegians have such a strong connection to nature? We have a strong connection to nature, especially my generation. There’s an understanding that the nature of Norway is beautiful, and you should use it, go on Sunday walks, have your vacations in the mountains in your small cabin, go skiing, of course, all Norwegian’s go skiing! I’m not sure if it’s the same with the younger generation but it’s part of our society and important to our culture.

Do you think there’s a connection between nature, landscape and electronic musical sounds? I feel there’s a connection between the landscape and the music, we have album sleeves with photos of the landscape, so the connection is understood. You can kind of connect snow, cold ice with sounds that are similar. For example, if you have an echo, you can have a warm echo. If you add a lot of reverb to it, you create a sound that is a warm echo, but you can also have a cold echo, it’s less reverb and the sound will be brighter. So there might be elements already present in the music but sometimes you have to imagine these connections into the music because if you just listen to music without any kind of understanding, knowledge or photos it’s rare that you would hear these connections. You can see the connection in artwork, titles that will have some association with nature and the landscape. And of course, music is very much about movement and then you have movement or a drive forward. There’s rhythm and you feel there’s kind of a movement. You often set this movement in some sort of landscape.

FEEL THE FJORDS: Urban club culture and Arctic scenery in the music of the Norwegian duo Röyksopp.

FEEL THE FJORDS: Urban club culture and Arctic scenery in the music of the Norwegian duo Röyksopp.

Do you think there’s a Tromsø sound that has been formed by its landscape and geography? I think there are many other influences in Tromsø’s music as well as the natural ones. Tromsø is a coastal area so there’s not permanent ice there the whole time. It’s not like Solvær, an island near the North Pole, Tromsø is more Arctic than Oslo. You have sun, snow, ice and the ‘northern lights’ and a connection to natural experiences when you live in Tromsø; to what extent that has directly influenced these musicians it’s hard to say.

Why do you think Norwegian producers are so collaborative? In Norway, you’re don’t compete too much, and in the schools, it is not very competitive; we’re busy trying to make people work together and collaborate.

How important to Norwegian music is national identity? Identity is important for everybody everywhere. We are proud of our country, nature and landscapes. I think some of the electronic dance producers felt that they were on the outside. They didn’t live in Britain but were influenced by the music and urban sounds that they heard from there. It’s a kind of collaboration between these different identities. There is a very strong sense of wanting to be culturally cool or hip in the dance music community. It was very important to be one of the hipsters or VIPs jumping the queue and getting into all the cool places in Oslo’s club culture during the nineties. This is important when you talk about identity, it is false to be hip and cool. Norwegian nature and landscape are not really that cool to Norwegians. For example, when they are portrayed in a British magazine they would say ‘Feel the Fjords’ or the ‘ultimate chillout’ linking directly to the connection with nature in Norway. In this sense, artists may feel pressure to connect with the environment or even fight against it. Maybe you can see a sense of irony in many of the photos where they present themselves in the natural environment in an ironic way?

Norwegian music seems to have a sense of mischief and humour. Why do you think that is? Maybe some of the same reasons. Mischief can be used to show that you don’t think things are that important or I’m not struggling to make a success in somewhere, this is just something I do for the fun of it. This is just a part of it, but I think the ‘cleverness’ in making good dance music is much more important. The production of tracks with good grooves and melodies are more important elements in becoming a success.

What is it about Norway that is considered ‘exotic’ to the rest of the world? I don’t think it’s that exotic to grow up here. We are on the outskirts of central Europe. Of course, there are the clichés about living in Norway, the country life, the snow, the cold winters but now we have warm houses and it’s not that awful. Norway’s ‘exotic’ label is also created abroad when (music and culture) journalists write about Norway, it’s a way to start writing about Norwegian artists. As a journalist it’s difficult to write about music, for instance, how are you going to talk about the ‘sounds’ of the music? ‘ It’s easier to start with something specific and Norway has mountains, ice, snow, dark season and Tromsø being so far north, it has all of these.

How important do you think Röyksopp’s Melody AM was for global recognition of Norwegian dance music? We must go first back to the eighties and A-ha’s breakthrough with ‘Take On Me’ and ‘Hunting High and Low’ was also very important for Norwegian artists. It showed that it was possible for Norwegians to make it in the US, England and the rest of the world. After that, quite a few Norwegians artists were successful international in places like France, Japan, the Philippines and other exotic countries. For example, in the late nineties, Röyksopp and Kings of Convenience (Röyksopp in 2001) were successful in England and globally and this inspired Norwegian artists. It’s difficult living in remote locations but when artists are successful it presents an opportunity; recently we had Ylvis, ‘The Fox (What does the Fox Say?)’. It shows that there are new ways of distribution, online or YouTube to make your start. You don’t have to travel to England or contact with a British record label to be promoted, now if you have something good you can go for it on your own. ‘Melody AM’ was released at the right time and showed that dance music can be taken into a different place. For example, the track, ‘Poor Leno’, it’s very danceable, but it also has very strong melodic themes. ‘Eple’, uses sampling techniques in a cool way, taking a tiny piece of improvisation and making something fantastic out of it. The album was very creative and did fun (mischievous) things with samples and the music. It had great grooves and strong melodic themes and brilliant vocalists such as Anneli Drecker and Erlend Øye who sing on ‘Poor Leno’ and ‘Remind Me’.

From where has Norwegian music absorbed its wide range of influences? Growing up in Norway, we only had NRK Radio which did not play very much popular music apart from the Top 10. We had a strong economy and disposable income and we’d buy our own records. My local youth club held a disco every Thursday where I learned to dance to disco music, club music that came a few years later. We bought records and spent a lot of time at each other’s houses listening to what we considered good music. Everybody has their own [formative] listening experiences with music. This is enormous to the artist and producers, every different tune they have listened to during the years growing up; that creates identity. You can explore that identity to a much deeper level. I didn’t know very much Kraftwerk before I got into club music and then I really got interested also in them, exploring their early releases. In Norway, we had the record stores and we had friends who also had records!

How is homegrown dance music regarded by the establishment now? The national broadcaster NRK or cultural politics did not support dance music back then. They play it but they generally supported Norwegian classical music composers, folk music and jazz and acoustic singer-songwriters that sang in Norwegian. While people that made pop music, sang in English or worked in the dance music scene was not supported but they did have tracks broadcast on radio. There was lesser national interest around the success of Röyksopp or Todd Terje, compared to classical music, jazz and other events that are considered culturally important for Norway.

How do you think Norwegian music has evolved from the 70s? A-ha were important, their synth-pop music was produced by programming synthesisers, but we must go into the late eighties, early nineties before something really exciting happens and it came from Tromsø. It started with Bel Canto who were Geir Jenssen, Anneli Drecker, and Nils Johansen. Geir Jenssen went on to become Biosphere.  There were a lot of artists and electronic music producers coming from Tromsø such as Rune Lindbæk and Bjørn Torske. It started the style of dance music that is famous today. When Röyksopp released ‘Melody AM’ it opened it up for other artists, then came Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas and Olle Abstract and now Todd Terje.

How influential do you think Bjørn Torske has been? Bjørn Torske has been influential when it comes to using Norwegian track and album titles. His name, Bjørn Torske, Torske means cod (the fish). So, he’s given himself an artist name which Norwegian people think is fun. I think he encouraged the use of Norwegian words in this way, for instance, why would Röyksopp call a song Eple? It’s the traditional Norwegian name for a fruit. There’s probably a link to the Bob James album (with an Apple on the cover), from the sample used in the track? The band name Röyksopp is based on a Norwegian word with a Swedish spelling.  It’s means mushroom. The ones that blow smoke if you step on them.  It’s small, white. I think it’s called a puff mushroom in the UK. There might also be an association with magic mushrooms as a drug. You step on it and something amazing comes out!

Röyksopp and Todd Terje seem to have the most success internationally. Do you see similarities in their music? It’s easy to state the differences. Todd Terje is much more instrumental and seldom uses vocals. While Röyksopp use more vocalists. Similarly, they both use strong melodic themes paired with good grooves and beats that you can follow with your body and dance.

Why do you think Norwegian electronic music has a strong affinity with disco? We grew up dancing to disco music, and maybe coincidentally, but somewhere along the line people started to explore this connection. House music has a connection to disco music, such as with the fun, the irony and outrageous clothing of disco, which also connects to being mischievous.

Can you hear Norway’s influence being reflected by international artists and producers? I hope that our influence has been great melodies and grooves that evolve.

DJs seem to be very open-minded here, why do you think that is? Because we are outsiders? If you’re in the centre of cultural activity you’re more worried about what’s right or what’s wrong. We can explore different landscapes with nobody telling us how to do it.

Tell us about Röyksopp’s ‘Poor Leno’ video? It’s very traditional Norwegian at the beginning when they fly over landscapes that are very mountainous and head towards the sea surrounded by Arctic coastal landscapes, few houses, lots of skiing. Then you have this person, Poor Leno, but it’s not a person, it’s a strange creature with hipness and cool. Leno longs to go back to the mountains and it can, of course, be understood as a link to traditional Norway.  It’s not clichéd, and it’s cool to still have connections to Norway and it’s the environment. Musically, there’s one specific part that builds up, almost like going up the mountainside. Then suddenly it’s like you have come to the top of the mountain and see the amazing view; there are definite metaphorical associations between the music and nature in the video.

Do you think Röyksopp have a strong sense of melancholia? There is an element of melancholia but if it’s specific to a Nordic sound I’m not sure. They do use minor chords which are also used in deep house productions which they might have been influenced by.

These excerpts were recorded and transcribed with some parts of the interview being used in the final print of the Northern Disco Lights feature documentary film.

© Paper Vision Ltd (Pete Jenkinson/Ben Davis)

Recorded on a Zoom H2.

Transcribed by Fingertips, Louie Callegari and Tongue Tied.

Memoirs from Norway’s underground dance pioneers: Kolbjørn Lyslo #6

Travelling around Norway in the Spring is a fantastic experience. During my trip in 2013, we hooked up with the key movers and shakers involved in forming the country’s house and disco scenes. I was lucky enough to touch down in Oslo, Bergen and Tromsø, and many weird and beautiful places in the surrounding areas. I travelled with Ben Davis, who was directing the film we were working on, formed from interviews with the key people from the dance scene plus Paper Recording’s label artists such as Those Norwegians. We were also curious about the country, geography, and people and how they influenced each other’s creative passions. This film had a working title of ‘Northern Disco Lights – The Rise and Rise of Norwegian House Music’. During our visit, we spoke to as many of the DJs, producers, promoters and radio stations as we could and decided to publish these best bits that sum up the trip, the film and our findings.

Kolbjørn Lyslo is an electronic music producer from Tromsø, Norway, was a key stakeholder in the Tromsø music community from the later eighties and worked with Aedena Cycle, Röyksopp and produces house music under the name of Doc L Junior.

Hi Kolbjørn, what was it like growing up in Tromsø? Tromsø is a small town in the far north of Norway with more culture than most other towns this isolated from the rest of Europe or the rest of the world; it feels bigger than it is. Growing up in Tromsø we had a great sense of freedom and a lot of space to explore. Culturally, Tromsø was kind of avant-garde. When I was a kid, there was a lot of punk music. We had a local radio that played a lot of new stuff that people in this country had never heard. I remember I was about 9 and an older sister of a friend of mine gave me a cassette tape with Depeche Mode on one side and The Cure on the other side. And this kind of started the whole electronic music thing for me. I was 10 when I bought my first synthesiser, it was Poly 800 Korg.

Did you look up to the previous generations? I knew them by face because Per was working in the record shop and had heard of Bjørn Torske because he was into Depeche Mode as well, we were kind of on our own. We had a covers band that played Depeche Mode music. After a while, I hooked up with Torbjørn Brundtland and Svein Berge and Gaute Barlindhaug, we hooked up with Bjørn Torske and Per Martinsen after that. We kind of knew that if we wanted to put out music then we could just do it. They just did it so why couldn’t we? So, yes, they did make an impression on us. There was this record shop called Rocky Plate Bar and the unique thing about this place was it was run by an English guy who ended up in Tromsø as a travelling DJ. There was a lot of travelling DJ’s from the UK and Australia in the hotel circuit and club circuit. In the eighties, they had nowhere to get their records. This guy, Andy Swatland settled in Tromsø and set up a direct import link with the UK supplying all the travelling DJ’s in northern and southern Norway as he imported stuff that never made it to the regular shops. So, Tromsø became very important to the DJ circuit as Rocky Platebar was the main store for that kind of electronic music. I was just a kid then, but as I said I was into Depeche Mode and I found a lot of music that was hard to find in other Norwegian cities at that time. I bought my first house record at Rocky, the Whistle Song by Frank Knuckles. I remember it very well.

Alien Nation flyer, circa 1990

 

Did it feel like you were creating your own scene? We were very much on our own and there weren’t many people our age into the same stuff. We didn’t feel isolated, we were just into our own thing. It was just the way things were, we were into electronic music and it seemed nobody else was. I remember my first party on the 16th of May 1990, at a place called the Brygga Ungdommens Hus, (the Youth Centre) put on by Bjørn & Per. I guess it was the first dance party in Tromsø that a crowd of around 50 friends and locals attended.

When did you put out your first record? We sent out a lot of demos in 1992 and one was sent to the Planet E (Detroit, USA) record label and the owner Carl Craig called us. He wanted to put out the demo, but we didn’t manage to finish it! The year after we sent some music with Geir Jenssen, who went down to see Renaat (R&S Records owner) in Belgium. Renaat released it on Apollo Records in early 1994.

Were you involved with Brygga Radio? I did a couple of shows when I was visited Bjørn Torske as he had his own show on Brygga Radio. I listened to it all the time and it really meant a lot to me, we had nine hours of techno music every week. It was a local radio station without any strict rules on what was being played. Bjørn and Geir had the opportunity to play whatever they liked, and Bjorn had a lot of records! Geir Jenssen had a mail-order set up getting all the new things from Detroit and Europe, so I guess we were kind of lucky to have that station. It was a station for the younger generation of Tromsø and these programmes were for just 20 or 30 people; there weren’t many more people listening to it.

Doc L Junior, Bjørn Torske & Mental Overdrive circa 1990

Doc L Junior, Bjørn Torske & Mental Overdrive circa 1990

Did you feel like you were rebelling against anything? Making music in those days was a kind of rebellion. I wouldn’t compare it to the punk because the punk scene was much angrier. This was more like using electronic equipment that we could get our hands-on and do whatever we wanted with it. That was the rebellion. Not using it as it was supposed to be used, but the way we wanted to use it. The local reaction was that we weren’t really making ‘real’ music. People thought that we just pressed some buttons and the music came out all by itself. I remember we played some concerts at our school and nobody really understood what we were doing, they thought it was just some noisy stuff that they didn’t really have to bother about.

Tell us about your band, Aedena Cycle along with Svein Berge, Gaute Barlindhaug and Torbjørn Brundtland. We started when we were 13, 14 or something and we bought a drum machine and sampler together. We didn’t have a sequencer at that time, so we played the instruments and recorded them onto tape. What was special about it was that we started making music immediately. I bought a sound card for my computer and we started using sequencers then it became more technical. What happened then was that we started making our music individually. We weren’t a band anymore. It split us up in a good way because we helped each other out; we evolved individually as artists.

How did Röyksopp begin? Röyksopp started out when Torbjørn moved to Bergen, he was joined by Svein and they started producing music, making some really good tracks. I remember listening to them and they were much better than anything I had heard for ages. It sounded like something new. They then met up with Mikal at Telle Records who pressed their first single and he actively encouraged them to go and send it out to other labels. Röyksopp were unique in that they used samples in a totally different and very creative way. Everything was processed in a very precise and complicated way. It was technically advanced compared to other productions at the time. Plus, the music is brilliant, they were compositions rather than just samples over the top of beats. That was new in this genre of music.

Were you aware of the Bergen Wave music phenomenon? I was in Bergen a lot during the mid-nineties and I was in the middle of the Bergen Wave. I met Erlend (Ralph Myerz) at the time and we produced some music together. I did some work with Bjørn, Torbjørn and Svein in their studio. For me it was just something that evolved, it just happened organically as certain people met each other. Of course, Tore (Erot) made some brilliant music, also something very new at that time in Europe, his tracks sounded much more American

What’s your favourite Norwegian record? Biosphere with ‘Substrata’.

Favourite Norwegian producer? Biosphere.

What’s your favourite Norwegian club? Café Opera in Bergen because it was one of the first clubs where I could play my own music in Norway. Café Opera was a venue where you could play American, vocal, house, garage and more soulful tracks. It was the first place that it was beneficial to make this kind of music. It was an open-minded crowd, interested in all aspects of electronic music.

You were playing American house, were you the only one playing it at the time? I started playing US house tracks early on and I was pretty much the only one for a while. People played the ‘harder’ Chicago sound, but I played the Frankie Knuckles and Masters at Work productions from the early nineties. Bjørn Torske and Strangefruit started playing a lot of new tunes but they preferred the harder style. I loved the old soulful and soft, American electronic music, but I do like Detroit techno!

These excerpts were recorded and transcribed with some parts of the interview being used in the final print of the Northern Disco Lights feature documentary film.

© Paper Vision Ltd (Pete Jenkinson/Ben Davis)

Recorded on a Zoom H2.

Transcribed by Fingertips, Louie Callegari and Tongue Tied.

Memoirs from Norway’s underground dance pioneers: Vidar Hanssen #4

Travelling around Norway in the Spring is a fantastic experience. During my trip in 2013, we hooked up with the key movers and shakers involved in forming the country’s house and disco scenes. I was lucky enough to touch down in Oslo, Bergen and Tromsø, and many weird and beautiful places in the surrounding areas. I travelled with Ben Davis, who was directing the film we were working on, formed from interviews with the key people from the dance scene plus Paper Recording’s label artists such as Those Norwegians. We were also curious about the country, geography, and people and how they influenced each other’s creative passions. This film had a working title of ‘Northern Disco Lights – The Rise and Rise of Norwegian House Music’. During our visit, we spoke to as many of the DJs, producers, promoters and radio stations as we could and decided to publish these best bits that sum up the trip, the film and our findings.

Vidar Hanssen was, and still is a key stakeholder in the creative industries of Tromsø, Norway since 1989. He runs the Beatservice record label which has just passed its 200th release from mostly Tromsø based producers and artists.

Hi Vidar, A lot of artists and producers from Tromsø seem to have a mischievous sense of humour which is apparent in the music, for example, Röyksopp, Bjørn Torske, Rune Lindbæk, why do you think that is? The first generation of Tromsø artists was more mysterious and into techno using English track titles; the second generation including Ole Johan Mjøs, Bjørn Torske, Rune Lindbæk were all close friends who like having a laugh. Before they started making records, they played gigs in town all the time. Bjørn Torske (Ismistik) and Drum Island showed a lot of their sense of humour with the strange track titles and they used this humour in their records. I think the Oslo scene was also influenced, I saw a Full Pupp (label) compilation, and some of the track titles were very strange, Norwegian sounding track titles. I think this makes it interesting for the international audience abroad when they have these titles and they don’t know what it’s all about because it’s Norwegian and they don’t understand it, but the tracks are cool. The difference between growing up in Tromsø and Oslo was that they had record shops, venues and the national media was based there but in Tromsø, we didn’t have that focus on the Norwegian scene, so we just travelled directly abroad.

How did you all meet? There was only one high school or college (three years from 16 to 18) called Kongsbakken where Kolbjørn Lyslo, Gaute Barlindhaug, Torbjørn and Svein Berge, Bjørn Torske went but after me. However, Per, Geir, Rune, Bjørn and I all went to the same primary school. We were from working-class families, none of our parents was in the creative or performance industries.

When did you first hear about Bjørn Torske? Bjørn Torske was one of the people I knew that was listening to my radio show because he had been in contact and bought some of the records. When we were ordering stuff from England, sometimes you would order two copies and forget you already had an extra one so he got some of those records from me. I knew Bjørn before he was started to make music as also DJed on Brygga Radio along with Rune Lindbæk, so I knew him from those days. I started following him when he made his more techno music under the Ismistik alias.

Vidar Hanssen's Vinyl Collection

What was Brygga Radio like? We had four or five local radio stations in Tromsø, and Brygga Radio was for the more alternative, anarchic styles of music. A lot of guys had shows on Brygga from the first wave of Tromsø music producers like Per Martinsen and then from the second wave with people such as Rune Lindbæk.

How did the Norwegian disco compilations come about?
In the beginning, there was a lot of techno from the Tromsø artists, then we had this period where there was some techno but also some electronic and breakbeat stuff. As we approached the year 2000, people were starting to release a lot of house music from international labels, some on their own labels and some one-off stuff that they made themselves. Also, in this period we had a very small, tiny club in Tromsø called Yazz’n which was the start of the club scene that you now see in Tromsø. The club nights mostly played funk and house music. I DJed there a few times and the first Beatservice compilation, ‘Prima Norsk’ was my DJ set at the time. My thoughts were that the music was very cool and needed to reach a larger audience.

Do you think disco has had an influence on Norwegian dance music? When you DJ with house music those records have disco elements, but the pure disco scene is more of an Oslo thing. You have Bjørn Torske who has done some cool disco stuff. There are not many disco artists in Tromsø. When Bjørn made his disco records he was living in Bergen.

Did the ‘Bergen Wave’ make a difference to your record label Beatservice with the increasing international attention focused on Norwegian music?
Beatservice has always been an underground label and the successes have been more by accident than design. For example, the first Xploding Plastix album has been the label’s best-selling album and my biggest success has come with a pop style, a guitar-driven band called Flunk.

Vidar Hanssen making his Beatservice Radio

Vidar Hanssen making his Beatservice Radio

Do you think Norwegian electronic music has certain characteristics?
I think it’s spacy and has a bit of playfulness. You have a lot of sub-genres here, there are also some very good drum and bass players in Norway. Now you have a new generation of electronic artists, Cashmere Cat, for example, he is a very young guy with a lot of musical skills.

What’s your favourite Norwegian club ever?
My favourite club must be the original Yazz’n because it was so intimate and small, it’s legendary but nowadays I really like two clubs in Tromsø called Circa and Verte (VT – Verdensteatret). In Oslo, I have had some memorable evenings at Blå.

Who is your favourite Norwegian producer?
It is very difficult to pick one Norwegian producer. It switches from time to time. Nowadays, I like Lindstrøm very much. I have a complete Lindstrom compilation on my car stereo. I like everything he has done, but also Vidar HanssenGeir Jenssen’s Biosphere is classic.

What is your favourite ever Norwegian track?
My favourite Norwegian tracks are ‘I Feel Space’ by Lindstrøm, ‘Novelty Waves’ by Biosphere and ‘Jeg Vil Være Søppelmann’ by Bjørn Torske.

These excerpts were recorded and transcribed with some parts of the interview being used in the final print of the Northern Disco Lights feature documentary film.

© Paper Vision Ltd (Pete Jenkinson/Ben Davis)

Recorded on a Zoom H2.

Transcribed by Fingertips, Louie Callegari and Tongue Tied.

Memoirs from Norway’s underground dance pioneers: Rune Lindbæk #3

Travelling around Norway in the Spring is a fantastic experience. During my trip in 2013, we hooked up with the key movers and shakers involved in forming the country’s house and disco scenes. I was lucky enough to touch down in Oslo, Bergen and Tromsø, and many weird and beautiful places in the surrounding areas. I travelled with Ben Davis, who was directing the film we were working on, formed from interviews with the key people from the dance scene plus Paper Recording’s label artists such as Those Norwegians. We were also curious about the country, geography, and people and how they influenced each other’s creative passions. This film had a working title of ‘Northern Disco Lights – The Rise and Rise of Norwegian House Music’. During our visit, we spoke to as many of the DJs, producers, promoters and radio stations as we could and decided to publish these best bits that sum up the trip, the film and our findings.

Rune Lindbæk was a key participant in the Tromsø music community in the late eighties and nineties who has worked with Röyksopp, Those Norwegians and is a successful international DJ.

What was it like growing up in Tromsø in the seventies? Growing up in Tromsø in the seventies was very safe. Society was changing because in 1970 when I was born, Norway started to extract oil and gas from the sea, and it became a solid foundation from which our society could grow. Geographically, it is an outpost to the Arctic. But it is the most northerly university town in the world and our influences come from all over the world. It’s a very international city with so much going on, which you just wouldn’t expect from a city with a population of only 70,000.

What music were you listening to growing up? The big influence for me was Boney M’s ‘Night Flight to Venus’ album and ABBA my mum liked to listen to disco music. A friend’s big brother had ‘Man Machine’ by Kraftwerk and it changed my life completely. I thought it was really cool and very scary. I thought Kraftwerk were some of the scariest things I’d ever heard, but it was addictive. At the time, in Norway, there were no rhythms, it wasn’t like living in the Bronx [New York, US] hearing beats and rhythms all around you. The only music we heard was played on our national radio station which would have been something like the Carpenters, and other ‘nice’ music. I do really like the Carpenters because it reminds me of those days but there were certainly no rhythms in Norway! I started checking out AM Radio and built an AM receiver in my bedroom that had a 20-metre cable running out of my window to our neighbour’s tree, just to try and listen to music from Radio Luxembourg. Nowadays you can have all the songs in the world in seconds.

When did you start hearing [rhythmic] dance music? Well, when my mum came home with cassettes of disco compilations like labels like K-Tel [from the UK], and Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel, which Danish next-door neighbour came home back from Denmark with one day, I absolutely loved it. My mum had a very bad quality turntable and I tried to scratch with the Grandmaster Flash record to mess around with the bass and the treble and really enjoyed it. Whenever a similar track sneaked into our charts, there was that rhythm again, I loved it. When I heard ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order, it was the coolest thing I’ve heard in my life.

Club Volcano flyer, Tromsø 1995

Club Volcano flyer, Tromsø 1995

How did the Norwegian dance music scene start developing? The first thing I heard about a synthesiser which I thought was the ‘coolest thing’, but I didn’t know anyone that had it, was that Geir Jenssen’s Biosphere’s brother, who was in my class at school, had several of them at his home. They lived very close by, but I didn’t know him because he was older, but I do remember walking past his house and thinking, ‘he has synthesisers’. Bel Canto went to Ghent to record music and they returned having recorded an album that was really inspired us. Per Martinsen [Mental Overdrive], travelled to London to the first Mutant Waste Company parties which were one of the few places that played ‘Chicago’ dance music. There was a really influential record store in Tromsø called Rocky Plate Bar run by Andy Swatland who was importing music once or twice a week. A lot of DJs in Norway were buying vinyl from that shop because days or weeks after it has been released in America or England you could find it in Rocky. So lots of us were meeting in the import section of Rocky because you could find the latest international music on vinyl; Per Martinsen [Mental Overdrive] worked in that shop, it was very important to us. In the early nineties, I remember Biosphere was in The Face magazine and we were like, wow! We started to get DJs and producers like the Idjut boys and Harvey. People that inspired us were coming here. We were digging their stuff, and they were digging our stuff and that was really exciting, it felt like a recognition of what we were doing musically in Tromsø.

Did you play music on the Radio? We had Brygga Radio which allowed us to play everything we bought live on the air. It was an independent local radio station it wasn’t a national radio and we would just play Detroit techno at peak times, at breakfast or at drive time in the afternoon because we were selecting the music. There was also Beatservice radio run by an old friend called Vidar Hanssen that I engineered for sometimes. Beatservice used to be on Brygga Radio but moved to the local Student radio. At that time Beatservice was probably more of a synthesiser programme for synthesiser music but it overlapped with Brygga musically, it was fantastic, Beatservice played great music.

Tell us about the Drum Island and Those Norwegians projects? You could say that Tromsø actually means Drum Island. I like to use real names and word in tracks, and it has some relevance to myself because I’m from Tromsø. I could tell you. The musical project came from my record label also called Drum Island. There was an excellent record label in Ghent, Belgium called R&S Records who we were contacting and Renaat who owned the label loved my Drum Island label name and wanted to get involved, and we thought fair enough, why not! Those Norwegians started because we were listening to a range of music like the early Idjut Boys. UK productions that merged house with disco and we were really influenced by the way they used Jamaican [reggae] dub effects on disco; Those Norwegians made our own version of that. We were called Those Norwegians because there wasn’t any other Norwegians in that scene and it just stuck; I guess we were poking fun at ourselves because the name ‘Those Norwegians’ was actually really  ‘uncool’ at the time and we liked that.

Rune Lindbæk clapperboard, Tromsø 2013

Tell us about your record-buying trips to London. In the early nineties, we would save up money to go and buy records in the UK. Mostly London but also one of my friend’s parents had moved to Manchester, so I used to fly to Manchester and spend all my money at Piccadilly Records, which is still open and a great record shop. I would then fly to London to meet Bjørn [Torske] and return home. I was so skint that my choices were to buy the last Carl Craig 12″ in stock and not eat, just eat soup or not buy it and enjoy my time in the cafes and restaurants of London. I chose to buy the record!  Bjørn and I would meet up to go record shopping over a couple of days before returning home together to Norway.  We tried to get as many records as we could get from London and Manchester England and bring them home to Tromsø for our radio shows. We also brought back from London cassette recordings of pirate radio shows which were then copied and shared around everyone in Tromsø. If you listen to the first Biosphere album ‘Microgravity’, it’s actually breakbeats from those tapes. Biosphere had a radio show on Sunday nights and this imported music must have clicked with him because if you listen to his radio show you can actually hear elements of ‘Microgravity’. At around the same time parts of Tromsø got satellite television and the daytime sci-fi programmes; all the sounds on this album are sounds I recognise from those shows!

What was Bjørn Torske’s role in the development of Norwegian dance music? Bjørn was a massive part of the scene, his thing was to fuse his sound with dub and disco. Also, he was very important in the development and growth of the scene because he was among the first of us to move from Tromsø to Bergen. I didn’t really feel the Bergen Wave, it was more a case of just Bjørn and old friend Erot who were making music. The ‘Bergen Wave’ name was just a typical UK way of reporting and making linking it to a specific geographical area.  It wasn’t like Bergen this and Oslo this, Bjorn was from here, Tore [Erot] and Annie were from here and staying at mine. Tore & I used to hang out when I used to live in Oslo, as a producer and inspiration he was very important for Norwegians. His productions have a bit of quirkiness in them and they still work on the [dance] floor when I use them as a DJ.

What makes the clubbing experience so special? When I DJed in Oslo, Skansen was a fantastic, very hedonistic club, along with other great places in Oslo like with Jazid, Head-On and Blå. It had a great sound system for a converted public toilet that had been closed for ages. It was tiny and we didn’t need many people to create an atmosphere, and it had tonnes of atmosphere! The best clubs in Norway though have probably been in Oslo, it’s the smaller sized clubs that get ‘packed out’ as you don’t need many people or really pumping [hard] music to get the dancefloor going. You just need a few heads and a great atmosphere, and there are plenty of ‘weirdos’ who like to dance in Oslo! The clubs have definitely been a factor in shaping the music we make as you don’t need to reach thousands of people in the club. If your music reaches the right people, the experience inspires you. If this were a place where you needed mass appeal, big [superclubs] clubs with hard sounds then our music would definitely have sounded different. This was a smaller version of Berlin with little basements or jazz clubs, not made for a lot of people, but for the right people. The nights at the legendary Nomaden in Oslo were also very important to try out new music on the crowd. It’s one of the few places in the world where you could play this [specific] kind of music and the dancefloor would scream, it’s one of the best clubs that has ever existed.

Those Norwegians - Kaminsky Park

Those Norwegians – Kaminsky Park album artwork

Why do you think Norwegian music is influenced by such a wide range of music? I think the collective influences from the people here are one of the main reasons, a lot of people who produce electronic dance music in Norway have large record collections. There are synthesiser guys, dub guys, Kraut guys and disco that came before us and now we can just make our own ‘local’ version of it with a ‘Norwegian twist’ because we have the technology, they didn’t. We gained confidence from our record releases which did ok amongst the people we consider it important to reach. This bred confidence between us. Norwegians were producing some great records; you’d play them out and they worked on the radio and in clubs and the locals really liked it. They didn’t realise that it was Norwegian music. Some of the biggest records I’ve played in my 30 years of DJing have been made in Norway.

Could you tell us about Frode Holm’s role in the Norwegian scene? There didn’t appear to be many attempts at making disco in Norway and we had all been trying to find traces of proper disco [being produced in Norway], then we found Frode Holm who was running a record shop in our main hangout in Oslo. His best track ‘Fotspor’ from his 1981 album ‘Holme CPU’ has fantastic production, great vocals and lyrics which tell a story about going out into the world and marking your mark. There might not be much going on in your local area, so you can go to LA, New York or San Francisco in North America. I can relate to these lyrics because in Tromsø until we started doing parties, I really wanted to be somewhere else.  I can really relate to the feeling that you don’t want to be stuck in the same place forever. Probably why I ended up in Oslo of course, it’s such a fantastic city. Frode’s music was influenced by really pure disco, jazz-funk and soul but with a Norwegian lyric which made for an odd record that was so important in Norwegian musical history. So Frode was a pioneer here in Oslo, of a generation born twenty years before us but doing what we are doing now, back then.

When did you start DJing internationally? My first gig abroad was in North Yorkshire, in 1993, when I was studying journalism at Darlington College in the North East of England. There was a record shop in Darlington where I met Moonboots who was putting out twelve inches. I had heard a rumour about this record shop in a derelict area of town behind some garages, as I walked past, I heard a bass drum and went through a door. I thought I’d arrived in heaven. It was packed with people, shrink-wrapped American imports, even back then! From 1998 I was a bi-monthly resident at Plastic People in London. I started going to London on the last British Airways plane on a Saturday afternoon and flew back on the first plane Sunday morning. After that, we discovered ‘Sunday Best’ which was a key club event in the timeline of disco and Balearic music, and it became a home from home for me. Around 2000, I started DJing in Easter Europe more and you think that Eastern Europe, just after the Berlin Wall came down that it would be dull and grey. Wow, they like to party. I have DJed at so many gigs and they’ve been fantastic. My style of DJing is not for every club, so the number of places I can play is limited but I DJ once a month somewhere in Europe and have a great time. I perform in clubs that want to hear good music, I put in ethnic elements, dub it up and have a bit of fun, try not to be so serious. Dance music resides in a strange world but I’m really happy to be a part of it.

These excerpts were recorded and transcribed with some parts of the interview being used in the final print of the Northern Disco Lights feature documentary film.

© Paper Vision Ltd (Pete Jenkinson/Ben Davis)

Recorded on a Zoom H2.

Transcribed by Fingertips, Louie Callegari and Tongue Tied.

Memoirs from Norway’s underground dance pioneers: Per Martinsen #1

Travelling around Norway in the Spring is a fantastic experience. During my trip in 2013, we hooked up with the key movers and shakers involved in forming the country’s house and disco scenes. I was lucky enough to touch down in Oslo, Bergen and Tromsø, and many weird and beautiful places in the surrounding areas. I travelled with Ben Davis, who was directing the film we were working on, formed from interviews with the key people from the dance scene plus Paper Recording’s label artists such as Those Norwegians. We were also curious about the country, geography, and people and how they influenced each other’s creative passions. This film had a working title of ‘Northern Disco Lights – The Rise and Rise of Norwegian House Music’. During our visit, we spoke to as many of the DJs, producers, promoters and radio stations as we could and decided to publish these best bits that sum up the trip, the film and our findings.

Per Martinsen is a sonic artist, electronic music producer [Mental Overdrive], DJ and performer from Tromsø, Norway; he’s also one half of Frost with his partner Aggie Peterson.

Hi Per, tell us what it was like growing up in Tromsø. Tromsø geographically is on the outside. It’s the biggest town this far north if you look down the planet from the top. A lot of cultures are based around the survival needs of living here, so when we grew up this shaped our culture, we were told: “This is where we’re from and this is what we do”. When technology-based means of communication and creativity such as the internet came into our lives they were organically integrated into our culture. I grew up in the 1970s and moved away in my late teens, before the internet and even before Norway began fully using the English language so communication with the world was difficult but growing up here was perfect because we could just sit up here and monitor the world. We could sit here and watch what the humans were up to in other parts of the world. We ordered fanzines and music from the UK and Europe and the UK and we had little import sharing ‘factories’ where one of us would order a record, we’d copy it onto cassette and distribute it around Tromsø. We imported a lot of youth cultures such as post-punk, early German electronic experimental music, Freaks from the West Coast of the US and even bands like The Residents performed in Tromsø in the nineteen-eighties. Here we were, sitting on top of the world looking out, trying to find things we thought interesting going on down there, where the other people were. We collected everything in to a big heap that we shared amongst ourselves. We would import mail order records, fanzines and cassette tapes and copy the music onto tape to share and lend each other the literature to read.

Did you all go to the same school or college in Tromsø back in the day?
Some of us lived across the bridge, on the mainland in Tromsdalen (Geir, Bjørn, Rune, myself), but due to age difference, I only knew Geir from outside school and didn’t meet the others until after finishing school. Kolbjørn, Aggie and the Royksopp boys grew up on the Tromsø island and went to a different school.

Was there Norwegian culture that interested you or was it all from abroad? Most of it was from abroad and ultimately Norwegian dance culture started emerging, but when you are situated in Tromsø you are three to four hours’ drive from the nearest town, 2,000km from Oslo. It’s all viewed as just the ‘other place’, there was a lot of relevant parties and people in Oslo and other towns that I didn’t know anything about until over twenty years later. It was more difficult to get information from around Norway than it was to find out what was going on in Berlin and London!

Do you think Tromsø’s isolated geographical isolation influenced the music that you began to make? I think when I grew up here eclectic was the best way of describing the music production we made because we didn’t know what was right or wrong [there were no parameters]. The first time I met somebody who was into ‘drum & bass’ and not ‘jungle’, I was like “Oh, wow you do exist”! People are perhaps more fragmented in larger cultures because you have to choose your ‘place’ or ‘position’ in that scene or culture, but when we grew up we had total freedom because we could just sample everything, put it into one big cauldron and start mashing it up. I heard music through teenagers when I was pretty small and the radio [National radio] didn’t play any exciting or cutting edge music but there was one programme I listened to on NRK P1 with Harald Are Lund, he played interesting music. The British music papers were very much in demand up here as we tried to follow what was going on in the underground music scenes around the world. The crowd I grew up with really wanted to explore different soundscapes and scenes and were very curious about all forms of alternative music. There was a guy called Jon Strøm (who was a couple of years older than me) who used to invite people like me and Geir Jenssen around his house on Fridays to drink beer and listen to the mail-order ‘catch’ of the week. It would be a very eclectic mix of punk, post-punk and pop and he would introduce us to records by Crass, Dead Kennedys along with ABC and Chic. I remember hearing “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life” by Indeep and “Warm Leatherette” by The Normal for the first time at Jon Strøm’s. He ordered some of his records from Rhythm Records on Portobello Rd in London but not 100% sure. We ended up having eclectic influences such as electronic, punk, pop or experimental music, the music just had to have something special.

Doepfer A-120 Analogue Modular Synth in Per's Studio

Doepfer A-120 Analogue Modular Synth in Per’s Studio

Tromsø and Norwegian electronic music seem to have this otherworldliness. Do you think it reflects Norwegian identity? It’s a strange question for me to answer because if the music we make has something special like a local flavour or oddness then it’s a question that should be asked of someone outside of Tromsø or Norway. It’s hard to analyse your own or my [connected] contemporaries’ music. You do what you do, and you put it out there and see what reflects other people’s opinions. I don’t need to be shaped by what surrounds me and that is the freedom you get growing up in Tromsø, we could sit here and sample every kind of alternative or strange music from any global subculture and spit back our version; we didn’t have to fit in anywhere. If I grew up in a bigger city where there was a [specific] sound I would [potentially] start trying to fit into that [city’s] ‘sound’ and the creative freedom of not having to respond to your surroundings is great. Dance music is such social music, it is a language and you can communicate something with it. It needs to work on some level but as long as it makes you move, or appeals to you at a basic level then you can put as much of yourself into it as you want; that is the freedom that comes from the Tromsø scene. You don’t answer to anyone. You just make what you want to make.

Tell us about Geir Jenssen’s role in the Tromsø music community. Geir and I met when I was 11 years old and he was three or four years older than me. We shared a love of the great outdoors and met in a mountain cabin and it was the first time I’d heard Kraftwerk’s ‘Man Machine’ on a portable cassette deck. Geir was a dedicated music fan who got the best stuff and really followed what was happening, and he told me one day, “I’m going to buy a synthesiser and start making music”. We already played in bands, but he started making electronic music and it was brilliant. I don’t remember the year, but it was when bands started the transition from rock into electronic bands; I already owned drum machines and we started to play around with them, and managed to get hold of some synths: Korgs, MS10s, MS20s, begged and borrowed until we got what we needed and then we started making tapes. I even used a cassette deck as a sampler using rewind techniques. We had a great time experimenting (and struggling) to make our own sound.

Northern Disco Lights 2017 screening at TIFF (Tromsø INternational Film Festival)

Northern Disco Lights 2017 screening at TIFF (Tromsø International Film Festival)

How important was his success with Bel Canto on your developing career and scene? We were all making music and performing together but they went off to Belgium, and I went to the UK around the same time. We always met up when we returned to Norway to share experiences and play each other’s music. Many of us [Tromsø artists] started releasing records around 1987-88 and the fact that they were released on international labels gave us all confidence. if you look at the punk scene in Tromsø there are only two or three single releases, but if you look at the punk scene in Oslo in the late 1970s or even Trondheim, there’s tens or hundreds of bands releasing singles. We were up in the Arctic and just to get somebody to transport a pressing of 500 seven inch vinyl up to Tromsø would be very expensive and could ruin you. Also, when they arrived, they would just sit in your basement and it was really hard to get them back out into the world because we were so far away [geographically] in Tromsø.

How did you start producing music and was it just for yourself and friends? I started making noise when I was a kid. I was banging and drumming on anything, I would find and destroy my mother’s cookie jars. I just needed [to release my] energy and make [turn] it into sound. We started bands when I was about 13-14 years old. Punk had just happened, but I liked the aesthetics and the DIY ethic of the punk movement rather than the music. I didn’t really enjoy the music but after in the post-punk era was a brilliant time to kind of be interested in music. Those were the formative years and shaping of my musical tastes. All the bands I was listening to started using drum machines and I tried to play like a drum machine. Bands that influenced us were mainly UK based such as Joy Division and then New Order and they began getting influenced by American dance music. I had this record from a Canadian duo, I didn’t enjoy the music very much, but they looked like New Romantics sitting at a coffee table and on this table was this ‘crazy’ machine. I was like, “What the fuck is that machine?” as it just looked awesome. I went to the local music shop and took the album to ask what it was? and they said, “a Roland”. This was maybe in ‘83 or ’82 and they telephoned Roland, and it was a TR808 drum machine. I was like I want one of those. I realised that this was the same machine being used by Arthur Baker productions and a lot of the records I was listening to. I worked for the whole summer in between school and spent all my money on a TR808. That was my first machine. It was perfect and it did the trick. I don’t have it anymore, but I still use its sounds. We were really opposed to everything around us and we tried really hard, perhaps too hard to create our own little space. We were trying to do something different but at the same time absorbing lots of brilliant influences coming from elsewhere. We tried to copy interesting music and when we were successful at the copying it turned out a bit boring but when we were unsuccessful it turned out very interesting.

What did your parent’s generation think of this? The established traditional musicians and crowds in Tromsø already hated the punk scene when suddenly these people came on stage to perform without traditional instruments they were outraged. The only way to be a rebel was to do something that had never been done in Tromsø before. Mine and Geir and I guess Runes parents were working class, but I believe Bjørn’s parents were academics connected to the University. I don’t think any of us came from families involved in creative, art, performance industries.

When & why did you go to England? I actually left Tromsø for Oslo in the mid-1980s but I didn’t find much going on, so I returned to Tromsø and worked in a record shop and then travelled to the UK by chance really. I just got on a train and ended up in Copenhagen, met a friend and we moved around Europe together until ending in London. Luckily, I met some people who were squatting in Hackney and suddenly I had a room for a few months. After that, I had an opportunity to work in a recording studio in Brixton called Cold Storage Studios where a few of the bands that I listened to were based.

What was the London dance music scene like when you were in the UK? The first Detroit Techno and Chicago House cassette tapes started circulating just before Christmas in 1987 in Hackney and during the winter of ’88 I really got into it. I was already into electronically produced music but when I heard ‘Detroit Techno’ for the first time I immediately understood that need to be investigated! One of my friends came over to London in the early summer of ’88 and was really eager to hear what was going on and I was willing to share all of my new music. I remember returning to Norway for Christmas that year and meeting up with Nils Johansen from Bel Canto as he was on Christmas holiday from Belgium. He asked me what kind of music I was working on and I explained there was a lot of techno and house music in London and he said: “What’s that?”. I didn’t have any music with me but he had a synth rig set up in his room, so we went back and I played him some of the sounds and beats and a few months later in London I had a phone call in the studio from Mark Hollander who owned Belgium’s Crammed Discs label and they had started a new dance subsidiary called SSR. He said, “I really like the demos that you made that Nils played me. Can you come over to Belgium and finish them?” I was really surprised as they were just demos but, of course, I went to Belgium to work on the tracks.

Can you remember the first time Bjørn and Rune came over to see you in London? I took Bjørn [Torske] and Rune [Lindbæk] record shopping in Soho and they were so excited, we had a real laugh. I think Bjørn was the most enthusiastic person I had ever met in my life. He was so genuine about his interest in music that it was really fascinating. It was like wow!

When did you return to Tromsø from Belgium? I went back regularly to see my family as I have two younger brothers who were teenagers at that time, and I had lots of friends there still. We had some parties and I got to know Bjørn Torske and other people younger than me such a Kolbjørn Lyslo who had been buying records off me in the record store a few years earlier. There were a lot of young people making brilliant music.

Bjørn Torske & Per Martinsen in the Yorkshire 2016

Bjørn Torske & Per Martinsen in the Yorkshire 2016

Where do you think they found their creativity and inspiration? They were probably just geeks into synthesisers and electronic music because already when I was at the record shop [Rocky Plate bar from ’85-’86] there were always people creeping out of the woodwork asking for weird, challenging music that I didn’t know anyone but myself had heard of. They probably got their hands on information and music culture the same way as me before the internet took over the job of providing information.

Can you tell us about the first parties you put on in Tromsø? The first club playing house music was when Bjørn & I decided to put on a rave. It was very DIY. We combined our record collections, made all the décor and rented a sound system. I was into hobby electronics since I was a kid and managed to build two strobes and then we were given permission to hold it at the Brygga Ungdommens Hus (Youth Centre). We designed and photocopied flyers and everything was set, it looked fantastic and we had our rave, me and Bjørn. He was playing, I was dancing and then he went on the decks and I went on the decks and he danced. That was the first house club in Tromsø, Norway. The classic two-man party. After that, I was asked to DJ at a mainstream disco in Tromsø a Saturday night. There were a lot of US marines based here from Chicago and I think they were quite used to house music by 1988. The club was packed and completely ‘going off’, kind of weird. All these people were asking me, “Where the hell did you get this music?”, “How can this be? We’re in the Arctic” and “How can this happen?”. We had our moments where we were successful in bringing these sounds to the locals here as well; not just exporting them.

Was there a moment where you would say there’s a Tromsø scene? There was definitely a ‘bedroom movement’ going on because when I returned home one time, a handful of the younger producers came to our studio to produce their recordings. Some of these sessions were sent to SSR in Belgium and released as the two T.O.S. [#1 & #2] EPs and these were the first releases by Bjørn Torske, Ole Johan Mjøs and Per Syamese.

Per MArtinsen breaks the charts

Per Martinsen’s Mental Overdrive smash the national charts in Oct 1995

Can you remember what happened around the emergence of Tellé Records in Bergen? Bjørn ended up moving to Bergen after we had played at a party there and I would visit all the time to this great club called Café Opera. It was at Café Opera that he introduced me to this really young guy. I had my portable DAT player (a very important piece of kit then) and this guy (who introduced himself as Tore) gave me a DAT, I listened to this amazing music. That was Erot, Tore’s first productions. Once we had both heard it, we immediately knew that this music had to be heard and we ended up releasing two of the tracks. The label was called Footnotes, Tore did the artwork and the tracks were called Milk Chocolate Swing and Haribo. Footnotes only had one release which was Tore’s first production. That was my first experience of the emerging Bergen scene, which blew up in the international media with the help of Mikal’s Tellé Records that released all these amazing 7″ singles with brilliant music. The main element of the Bergen sound of the ‘90 was pop. It was brilliantly crafted alternative pop music. It was very eclectic with different producers such as Erlend (Ralph Myerz) and the Kings of Convenience that had a Simon and Garfunkel sound, it was very creative and artistic. These original energies come and a scene explodes and everybody is inspired and then it dies out and something else comes along and takes over but it was an amazing couple of years. The two main musical exports from Norway have been Black Metal and electronic music which reflect a certain level of international success when Norwegians look at themselves in the mirror, and this inspires others. There were so many female electronic pop artists from Norway, it was amazing; we’re such a small population but have a lot of people working in the music industry.

When did you first become aware of Röyksopp? I was playing at the festival here in the 90s and when I was setting up my gear four young lads came up and said, “Hi, we’re playing the support slot for you,” and they called themselves Aedena Cycle. That was Torbjørn [Brundtland] and Svein [Berge] from Röyksopp plus Gaute Barlindhaug and Kolbjørn Lyslo. That was their band and that’s maybe the first time that I met these guys, they were younger than Bjørn’s generation and they were the next generation of youngsters breaking on to the music-making scene. Tromsø had all these young, very enthusiastic people and it was really refreshing meeting them all. All the time there were ‘new faces’ that turned up with new music for me to listen to, and they were always driven by this mad energy. I loved it. You really want to listen to music made by people like that. Most people say, “Listen to this,” and you’ll probably listen to it eventually but if they are right in your face and the sun was coming out in the middle of the dark season you know it’s going to be refreshing. That was my first, very positive impression of Röyksopp. Torbjørn [Brundtland] moved to Oslo to work with Bel Canto on one of their later studio albums. They were in the next-door studio, so we spent some time together listening to each other’s music. Then he started playing me a lot of his own music and it was fantastic; really, good. This was pre-Röyksopp and there was probably some of the tracks that were released on the Those Norwegians album [on Paper Recordings], but it was via Torbjørn’s cassette and DAT, tapes that I heard what was going on with that crowd.

Has dance music changed your life? Yes, in a big way because I hated disco when I was growing up, I hated dancing. I had decided that I was never going to dance in my life but then, I heard quality dance music and some proper disco not just the pop charts stuff, so yeah it changed me a lot. It’s had a massive impact on my life. I think electronic producers in Norway have brought their own character to the sound. Every city or locality will have its own sound or technique that is inspiring to others, this new disco [Nu-Disco] production style established itself globally but I would love to see more challenging productions because I need more edge, more noise. I’m just an angry old man!

Insomnia Festival 2003

Insomnia Festival 2003 – Frost and Per Martinsen

How important is the Norwegian identity to your music? It’s strange because these days I probably have more in common with you than with my next-door neighbour because we’ve been interested in the same kind of culture and music. On one level the common references are closer than somebody you share a country with. On the other hand, you can’t go anywhere in the world and not bring ‘yourself’ with you. I’m always going to be Norwegian. I’m always going to be Northern Norwegian because I’m very connected to this landscape, and I really like rubbish weather. If it’s too hot I stop functioning and I have all these things built into my genes growing up here; I’m shaped by the people and environment here, it’s important that I’m Norwegian.

When did that turn into something that you thought good enough to release and share with the world? The first was a cassette release in 1984. It was Geir’s project under the artist name of E-Man and released on a cassette label based in Oslo called Likvidér; I worked with him on a couple of tracks that ended up on that tape. Geir released quite a few tapes at the time as he had invested in duplicating machines so that he could copy cassette tapes, photocopy the artwork and sell them via his mail-order [Biophon]. There were two punk bands in Tromsø that released seven inches but the cost of vinyl manufacture and distribution from so far north in Tromsø was prohibitive, so people saw cassettes as an opportunity to get their music out there. There was a lot of brilliant cassette releases from local bands in the 1980s that never saw the light of day.

Per MArtinsen breaks the charts

Per Martinsen’s Mental Overdrive smash the national charts in Oct 1995

How did you get swept up in the acid house movement? I ended up in London, England in 1987. Ever curious and a big fan of ‘industrial’ electronic music, a lot of these bands performed live in London so I just ended up just going there for gigs and hang out; I ended up living in a Hackney squat for most of ’87 and ’88. I hadn’t consciously set out to end up in this situation, but I was lucky because everything that was happening then in London during that period was so exciting.  I remember the first time I heard Chicago Acid and Detroit Techno music on a cassette tape given to me by a guy who was also squatting nearby in Hackney. He was called Mark Van den Berg, [Mark Luvdup] and that first tape was shared around everybody; we then started going to parties and warehouse clubs. I was ecstatic when I heard this music for the first time because in Tromsø the reaction to my productions was generally “Yes. Love the drum machine and bass lines and stuff but where’s the song?” I didn’t want them to be songs. I wondered whether there was a place for this music in the world, was it just for myself only? But, on hearing electronic dance music a couple of years later that was just ‘instrumentals/dubs’, and it was a revelation. It was like okay there is a space for this kind of music in the world and it’s in the clubs. Geir was with me in the UK at that time and we ended up working as tape-op assistants in a Brixton based studio, and since I had some of the gear that they needed in the studio we did kind of a swap, giving me access to the studio at night time, I’d help out during the day and sleep under the manager’s desk on the floor when needed!

What was your first commercial release? My first release was on the Belgian label SSR. The track was produced by Geir & me and was called ‘In Your System’.  When I was working in the UK, Geir and his band Bel Canto frequently travelled to Belgium to record and release music on Crammed Discs. I went home to Tromsø at Christmas 1987 and I explained about this new house and techno music to a good friend of mine, Nils Johansen who played in Bel Canto. I struggled to explain so I said, “Okay switch on your rig and I’ll show you,” and made some quick examples of the music I was currently working on right there and then. Nils played these demos to the Crammed Discs label owner Mark Hollander who invited me to Belgium to finish the tracks. The tracks were released on a new dance music subsidiary they were setting up called SSR (short for ‘Sampler & Sans Reproche’) and then later on R&S records. Geir started working on his Bleep album just before Biosphere in Belgium and I did a project with Samy Birnbach, [DJ Morpheus] who created the great Freezone compilation series for SSR/Crammed Discs. We did a track called ‘Hallucination Generation’ as the Gruesome Twosome that totally blew up in the US and they wanted us to follow it up but I had already moved on and started returning to Tromsø to work on new projects.

When you returned to Tromsø how were Bjørn and Rune begin fitting in with the community. I’m a bit older than them and there was a bunch of eager guys hanging around my younger brother who was six years younger than me but the same age as Bjørn and Rune who knew him. When I came back with all this new music which was emanating from our house, they got really into it. They began borrowing records, especially Bjørn for his radio show on Brygga. We produced some tracks together for Mark Hollander after Geir [Jenssen] had played some of the demo music they’d produced to him. Bjørn, and I think Rune Lindbæk or Ole Johan Mjøs ended up releasing the ‘TOS EP’ No. 1 and No. 2 ‘TOS – The Remixes’. TOS was the airport code for Tromsø.

Were you aware of any other producers or electronic music scenes in the rest of Norway? I didn’t know of anybody outside Tromsø that was into this kind of music in Norway. I had heard that there had been a club going for a couple of years in the small town of Lillestrøm outside of Oslo but that was a couple of years later.

Mental Overdrive_London, circa 1992

Mental Overdrive_London, circa 1992

Why do you think Tromsø was such a fertile location for making music? Tromsø is great for taking the time to get immersed in your projects, and in the dark season what else is there to do? You sit inside and you make or listen to music. It’s a great place to contemplate and be productive. You don’t run around town to parties and gigs all the time. Although there was a very vibrant music scene with gigs every three months. Pretty strange music was classed as amazing and bands like the Residents were huge in Tromsø. They were even bigger than Aha!

When did you first kind of become aware of an Oslo music scene? I ended up moving to Oslo in the early nineties and by chance, was invited to DJ at a party thrown by DJ Geronimo from Lillestrøm. They had been running a club for a couple of years in Lillestrøm (a small town outside Oslo). I made new friends from that crowd and started playing the odd DJ slot at their parties. It was a long journey [from Tromsø] but I was like “how much time do I have on this earth?”. In Oslo during the early ’90s, as in every European city, we arranged some of the first legal raves and had guests like Aphex Twin, CJ Bolland and Outlander. I did support slots for bands like The Prodigy in huge arenas, but [I realised] this was not the reason I got into music. I decided to leave the techno arena rave circuit and return to playing the music we liked in small bars. That’s when I met Pål Strangefruit who had just moved into town and he was my favourite DJ at the time. The scene kept going with clubs like Jazid and Skansen for a few years and that’s when the Oslo style of disco was born. Dan & Conrad, Idjut Boys came over to DJ frequently as they were our favourite DJs at the time. Local music was being produced and I made some tracks with an English producer called Nicholas Sillitoe under the name Illumination. We did a few singles, then an album and suddenly we had a creative, vibrant club scene with lovely music and people, everything you need to have a good scene.

Why do you think Norwegian electronic music has such a strong connection with disco? The mid to late 90s club scene of Oslo and Bergen brought disco to the attention of Norwegian clubbers. I grew up hating disco. It was the worst thing ever but I couldn’t understand why I felt like this? I worked out there were two reasons. The first was that growing up I was never played tracks by Patrick Cowley or Arthur Russell Productions; I was just played chart music. The second reason was at the school dance when I was 11. They were playing some amazing disco tracks, I got carried away with the groove and started dancing with some girls and I was in heaven! Getting down to the groove and that was my acceptance of disco music! But the school bully was stood next to me and while dancing, I knocked his fresh new bottle of Coke right out of his hand. At the time, a bottle of Coke cost as much as a skyscraper and he really threatened me; I think that was the moment when the word disco left my vocabulary. and I stopped listening to it. Now, listening to disco is like therapy for me. I also had conversations with Renaat from R&S Records in the early 90s when I was really into hard techno, he loved disco and tried to convince me that all dance is rooted in disco and that I was living in denial! Later, Bjørn [Torske] started bringing along all this great disco and when Tore (Erot) started producing I realised that my personal relationship with disco had been one of trying to come to terms with it, obviously now I understand it’s part of the foundation for all the music I love. The most influential years were when Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and later Todd Terje emerged onto a very health Oslo scene where small clubs were playing great music laced with disco. I rediscovered this great disco music from the past that I had missed out on.

Kvaløya (Whale Island, Tromsø), 2013

Kvaløya (Whale Island, Tromsø), 2013

Can you talk about Tore and his role in Norwegian music? Tore was serious when it came down to making his disco music. He came to my studio with a keyboard and played his own solos which were then used in my sampler to put them into tracks; he was so focussed with nothing left to chance. Tore was a very funny, lovable and kind person.

You, Bjørn and Röyksopp and a lot of Norwegian producers have a real sense of mischief, why? I think you should take your music seriously but not yourself and if you do your friends will tell you. This is a good way of keeping people on their toes and I think life is like that. If you don’t make your own fun you’re not going to have any.

Can you tell me about when you and Bjørn delivered the album to Joakim at Smalltown Supersound? He released some of my music on Smalltown Supersound and he began talking about Bjørn all the time, asking me “What’s Bjørn up to and will he release anything?” and he really wanted to put out some of Bjørn’s music. They started talking and agreed on doing an album and eventually, Bjørn put the finished album onto a CD master. He called me and said, “How are we going to give this to Joakim?”. We decide on a fun way to do it. I took my camcorder and Bjørn’s CD master to Oslo airport filming myself arriving on the express train, walking through the station to the luggage lockers. I held up the CD master and filmed the number of the box and put it in, turned the key and stopped filming. I then went to the local post office where Joakim had his PO Box and I put the luggage locker key in an envelope and wrote Joakim’s name on it. Since it was also my post office, I started chatting to one of the guys working there and I said, “Can I just put this in Joakim’s PO box? It’s just right there.” And he was like, “It’s not how we usually do it but OK this time”. I managed to put an unstamped envelope with only his name in his PO Box and when Joakim came to collect his mail in the morning, he found this mysterious envelope with just a key inside. I sent him an email from a fake email account linking to a website that I had set up. It was when the US Pitchfork site was launched so we called it Fitchpork.com and I posted the video so all he got was this key and a link to a video and he had to figure out the rest.

How important has Smalltown Supersound been? Smalltown Supersound and Joakim have been one of the main reasons that Norwegian music was recognised globally from the early 2000s because it was the only independent label that had enthusiasm, guts and a real love of music. When he wanted to start putting out music it was an easy decision to release it on Tellé Records because Mikal was genuine about his interest in music and Smalltown Supersound was an eclectic label. That’s something I value very highly. For a long period, Smalltown Supersound was the main outlet for Norwegian dance music.

 

These excerpts were recorded and transcribed with some parts of the interview being used in the final print of the Northern Disco Lights feature documentary film.

© Paper Vision Ltd (Pete Jenkinson/Ben Davis)

Recorded on a Zoom H2.

Transcribed by Fingertips, Louie Callegari and Tongue Tied.

The Paper Wave Radio Show – Tony Allen Special

We were absolutely gutted to hear about Tony Allen’s passing. Ben Davis wrote a lovely post post (see below) and dedicated a Paper Wave Radio Show to him. There are interviews, his influences, knockout music and the finest drumming the world has ever heard.

It was with a heavy heart that I learned of Tony Allen‘s passing. He has long been one of my musical heroes and its interesting how upset you can feel about somebody you never met. As I write this, I’m looking at a picture of him right next to my desk that has been up for many years as a creative and musical guiding light. Only this morning his brilliant new album dropped through my letterbox.

We approached his management to make a film of his life four years ago and shook hands on it in Paris, which was one of the most exciting days of my life. Unfortunately it never happened but as we developed and researched the project, my admiration for him just kept growing. How many people can claim to have invented a musical genre?

Through post-colonial Africa, Fela, lost years in Europe and the late blooming of creativity pushing musical boundaries, it is an incredible life and career. Just in the last 5 years he has been involved in projects that touched on techno, dub, jazz, hip hop (the list goes on) and all alchemised by his afromagic. I managed to see him live a couple of times and he blew me away on each occasion. Read “Tony Allen : An Autobiography of the Master Drummer of Afrobeat” for the whole, incredible story.

He will be looked back on, rightly as one of the greats.
A huge loss for music.
RIP Tony Allen

Ben Davis

Stevie Wonder vs. 2 Billion Beats – FREE DOWNLOAD

To celebrate Stevie’s 70th birthday, 2 Billion Beats took him in to the lab and this piece of magic is the result. 7 minutes of dancefloor heaven.

 

 

Paper Recommends – Swimming

Paper Vision have just started filming a new documentary on the Yorkshire wild swimming spot, Gaddings Dam. We have come across some brilliant stuff whilst researching it so here are two shorts that we especially loved.
Follow the production on @papervisionfilms
 

10 Meter Tower

It couldn’t be simpler, put people at the top of a 30 metre diving board and film them. The result is brilliant as they all confront their fear and overcome it…or not.
My Big White Thighs & Me
Our film will be a large part about mental health and people using outdoor swimming to help manage it. This is a wonderful short film as a woman overcomes negative body image, a miscarriage and her mental health through cold water. Funny, inspiring and moving in equal measure.