The Pelican’s Perch

It took two tries and was a long time coming, but my interview with Detektivbyran, my current favorite instrumental band, is finally here.  I sent the questions, both your questions and mine, to the band right as they embarked on their tour for Wermland, and Anders was kind enough to sit down and answer the majority of them.  I found all kinds of interesting stuff while reading it and I’m sure you will too.  I’ve been trying to do something more than simple artist spotlights and album reviews lately, and I think this is a very good first step towards expanding the Perch into something more than my music ramblings.  Enjoy the interview!

A Perch Interview with Anders of Detektivbyran

Anders, Jon, and Martin,

First off, here’s a big hello from The Pelican’s Perch and all its readers.  I know I can speak for a few of my readers in saying we love all your music, almost too much, and especially Wermland.  I try to involve my readers whenever I can, so I asked them if they had any questions for you guys and the following few actually threw some questions my way.  We’ll start with those, and then end with my personal questions.  Thanks so much for taking time out to answer a few questions from your fans and be sure to keep in touch.

Hello!

The interview will be done by me, Anders Flanders. Thanks.

From Alex:

1.Vem/vad inspirerar er.Andra musiker,eller vad som helst?
(Who/what inspires you? Other musicians or artists, anything.)

Anders:  My 2 year old kid, people, huge white grand pianos, the deep still woods of Värmland (which is the same place as Wermland), travelling, doing nothing, just sit in front of piano keys specially at old out of tune pianos, movies (last movie I watched and got inspired by was Juno).

Alex and Tammy asked the same thing:

2. Vilken slags musik lyssnar ni på.Är det någon genre eller artist ni lyssnar speciellt mycket på?
(What kind of music do you listen to? What genres and musicians specifically?)

Anders:
We listen to too many different kinds of music to answer this question, but I could say pop/punk/hardcore/jazz/electronica/country/metal.
Also:
I love Joni Mitchell.
Also:
I love Bruce Springsteen.

From B.J.:
3. Ask Anders what type of accordion he has…!

Anders:  The accordion is a Dise Smaragd. Swedish brand, build in Italy though, where all the best accordions are built. Around 40 kilometers from Gothenburg where we live there’s an Accordion palace, I use to go out there for hours and just hang out, chat with the owners and dream away in their Accordion Museum which is awesome. You can check out a video from the place, it’s on our myspace page. Episode 1 from our album recording video diary.

Now on to my question:

4.  First of all, as a musician myself, I’m curious about your song writing process.  Does one person come up with an idea and everyone just builds off of it?

Anders:  One person comes up with a melody and perhaps some chords to the melody. Then we try what instruments fit best to the melody, we play it over and again and usually find something nice pretty fast. only some few times we have written a whole song by just playing, 054 is made that way.

5.  I watched the behind the scenes videos about the making of Wermland. Was the recording process for this new one different from the last few albums, and did it go well?

Anders:  When we made the Hemvägen EP we didn’t care about the fact that we were going to play the songs live, but on wermland every note was planned with the thought that everything should be able to do live. We like it best that way. That’s a big difference.

6.  Let’s talk “E18″ for a second.  It’s my favorite song of yours and I can’t get enough of it.  What does the song title mean, and who’s idea was it to have that instrumental breakdown around 1:30 where’s it is just synthesizer, accordion, and simple percussion? Love that part.

Anders:  thanks. the title is the name of a european highway which goes through wermland an Karlstad, our home town. it felt extremely right to us to name it e18. the drums have a travelling sound to me.
no idea who’s idea it was… it just came up I think. Often those ideas happens very fast and we forget who came up with the ideas.

7.  Your music is full of traditional instruments, most notably the accordion and reminds me a lot of the Amelie soundtrack.  Have you   a) seen Amelie and   b) heard any of Yann Tiersen’s music (the composer of the Amelie soundtrack)?  If so, is he an inspiration to your music? I couldn’t think of anything better than a collaboration soundtrack for Amelie 2 between you guys and Yann Tiersen.

Anders:
a) yes!

b) yes! when we started out the band in the beginning of 2005 me and martin was very much inspired by his work, we really liked the accordion and glockenspiel, so we bought those instruments extremely inspired by yann tiersen’s work. With the time we found out that electronics as beats and synth fit well with accordion and glockenspiel and also the vibraphone which we used a lot on Wermland.

8.  Is your live set up pretty simple, or do you have all kinds of instruments on stage that the three of you just jump around and play throughout the songs?

Anders:  I have my accordion and a monster synth called Traktofon. the Traktofon has all the sampled sounds we used on wermland, so I can play synth bass with my right hand and accordion chords with my left hand in one song, then play the music box on another song and then the sampled tack piano in another song.. martin has his vibraphone, a glockenspiel and a monster Traktofon synth. Jon has a drumkit and drumpads which goes through a monster Traktofon as well, so for example in Kärlekens Alla Färjor and in Life/Universe Jon plays the synth bass lines on the drum pads, and in neonland he has the sampled beats on the pads, everything is played live.

I could say we all have one or two acoustic things each and a electronic monster each.

9.  Speaking of live sets…any plans to come tour the states? I’d love to see you guys live and don’t exactly have means to travel to far off places like Debaser Medis, Stockholm.

Anders:  We played in Minneapolis in the end of september which was soooo much fun. The US is fantastic and we really wanna play there more. We have plans…

10.  Back to Wermland.  I have a feeling that if they made a movie whose plot somehow combined that of Amelie and Top Gun, “Life/Universe” would undoubtedly be its theme song.  Where did the idea for this song come from? It’s much darker sounding than most of your songs and the pulsing bass line, combined with the Top Gun 80’s synth towards the middle and the driving drums throughout, make it feel like you guys wanted to mix it up and try something completely different. Was this different sound what you were aiming for with this song?

Anders:  this is one ofthe few songs that were written pretty much together from the start and also the only song we have written being not sober together. We had some leftover alcohol from some show (we never drink when touring, though we use to bring all we can carry back home) and we were supposed to leave the studio for the day, the time was around 5 pm, when someone said “I have this idea of a melody” and also “there’s a lot of cider over there”. In the late night we had a rough demo version of what turned to be Life/Universe.

It happened naturally. we are looking for new sounds, new feelings when playing.

11.  Finally, I recently started my own record label, LemonDrop Records, and have been having a blast setting that up and helping bands out.  If I mailed some LemonDrop Records stickers to you guys, would you stick them all over each town you tour just so I can say my record label’s stickers are all over the world?

Anders:  no problem, bring it on! there’s an postal adress on our website.

Here’s another huge thanks from both me and my readers for doing this for us.  Thanks again, keep making such great music and I’m loving the new album.  Keep in touch and I hope the tour goes great.  Later!

Thank You!

Om Du Moter Vag

Neonland

Bonus:
E18

Official Site / Myspace