Norwegian producers Lindstrøm and Todd Terje have announced a new live show that they'll take on the road throughout 2013.
According to the artists themselves, the collaboration is an attempt to "try something new after many years of travelling alone." Their first joint performance of 2013 will take place at the Nuits Sonores festival in Lyon on May 11th, with further gigs confirmed for Sonar, Melt! and A Day At The Park. More dates will be announced in the coming weeks. They've also unveiled a new collaborative track, "Lanzarote", which was released digitally today on Terje's fledgling Olsen label.
The on-stage and studio collaboration is a continuation of the work the duo began in 2012, when Terje mixed and edited Lindstrøm's Smalhans album. They also performed a "beta version" of their current live show at Oslo’s Øyafestival last year. Chatting via email this week, Terje and Lindstrøm gave us some background on the collaboration and their plans for 2013:
Why did you guys decide to do a live show together?
Both of us wanted to try something new after many years of travelling alone. What we do on our own is still quite exciting for us, but we think this new way of working together, bouncing ideas off each other could spark inspiration, like what happens between musicians in a band. Every time we practise we start playing some stupid cover, like Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now." We can't help it.
Can you tell us a bit about your set-up and what your show entails? How would you describe the overall sound?
Definitely more hardware. We've gotten a lot of new gear the last couple of years, and they've become quite important for our sound. There'll be more actual playing (not just hitting "play"), more not knowing what's going to happen the next minute. Well, it's electronic and it's danceable so we're not going to claim any peace prizes, but as both of us have backgrounds as musicians, we'll probably make it a tad more playful and hopefully add real music to it. What we need to do is set boundaries for improvising, find out how wrong we can go and how to pull ourselves back in. And no, we don't do requests.
Tell us a bit about "Lanzarote." When did you make it, and can we expect more collaborative material from you two soon?
"Lanzarote" started about two years ago during a rehearsal for an Oslo gig with the two of us plus diskJokke playing live. It was just a few chords and a beat, but we quite liked that '80s way of doing it; not being afraid of the major chords. Don't let the major scare you. We used Hans-Peter's Linn Drum on it, so the beat sounds quite authentic. Our mastering engineer complained about the lack of sub frequencies. We hit him.
What else have you guys got planned for 2013?
Both of us are working on our own albums, there's the usual pack of remixes and we're now also producing other artists, which is quite exciting. I have to say though that a typical day in our studio consists of about 35 percent actually making music and the remaining 75 percent (yeah, I didn't finish that university degree) just talking about food and coffee.
