20 Feb 2011 — Tonje Thilesen
Also see bylarm day 2 or bylarm day 3
As a few of you might already know,
Bylarm is an annual music festival based in Oslo, Norway, spotlighting mostly new underground music from Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland), and of course, what seems to have been the biggest hype of the year that has passed. Therefore it wasn't a surprise to see that names like
Susanne Sundfør, Young Dreams and
Lindstrøm made it to this year's line-up, as well as some of our own Swedish favourites -
Junip, Museum of Bellas Artes, The Concretes and
Niki & The Dove on the same list. In different to a normal outdoor festival, however, Bylarm consists of over 20 different venues, many of them located more than a 10-minute walk from the city centre. With the bands only playing half an hour each, it's hard for the few of us who wants to see everything to, well, we able to see everything. As if the distance wasn't enough, the otherwise icy streets of Oslo are these days also covered with an ocean of brown slush, making it hard for my poor converse shoes to find their way from A to B without getting soaking wet. That aside — here is our guide to this year's Bylarm festival, separated in three different posts, this of course being the first one. Enjoy.
I remember in late 2009 when
Team Me was only a tiny percentage of forever-growing music community
Urørt, only consisting of Marius Hagen at the time, with Team Me being a side project he had built up aside from a few other projects he was working on. A few gigs and interviews later, Team Me evolves from a one-man-band into a small indie orchestra, and just like that, I walk into Sentrum Scene, one of the biggest venues at Bylarm, and it's completely packed. I guess a part of the audience simply just hang around at a certain venue all night (while I keep running from venue to venue like crazy with cameras and lenses crashing into one another) — but as I see Team Me perform on what is their so far (?) biggest concert ever, they reveal a new, completely different side of themselves quite different from what I saw them perform earlier in 2010: simply put, they're tight as hell. All though I sort of miss that innocent, rattling indie pop sound, the 'new' Team Me impress, and by taking a quick glance at my fellow festival mates (with their eyes bathing in an indie pop heaven), I'm apparently not the only one sharing the same opinion. Just let me say this: it's a reason why the
Øya festival picked them to be the first name (along with singer-songwriter
Lucy Swann) to be on their
split 7" series.
Team Me - Dear Sister
I wish I had seen more than only ten minutes of the Icelandic singer-songwriter
Ólöf Arnalds of
Múm (you will find the reason why in the next column), and I also wish I had heard more of her music before I went to
Samfunnssalen, which is, to be quite honest, a shitty stage — basically just being one big room surrounded by thick walls. However, in a way the room acoustics and lack of lights made the whole thing an interesting experience, but in a way a little awkward too, with the audience sitting in front of her on cheap plastic chairs. Despite the location, however, Ólöf Arnalds managed to do the best out of it, and left the audience with closed eyes in complete silence, while the mysterious, Icelandic tunes filled the room like an ocean.
Ólöf Arnalds - Crazy Car
Norwegian singer-songwriter and NFOP favorite
Anana outbeat every other performance I've seen at Bylarm this year, much because of the amazing location she played in: a small, but beautiful church located a short walk from the main venues. The setting couldn't have fitted Anana's music in a better way, with candles being the main source of light in the church except for a spotlight or two on Anana and her keyboard on the podium, creating an eternal, spellbinding effect. It almost felt like walking into a church lost at the bottom of the ocean, with only a single beam of light from above the surface was gently shining down at Anana in her beautiful, white dress. Indeed - this is the very reason why people describe her sound as
underwater pop, cause to be honest, no other description would fit her dream-like tunes in any better way.
Anana - Tredgjegradsforbrenning
The minimal/tech duo
Of Norway was rather unknown to me before I read about them in the festival programme, with the description 'sounds like being lost in the Norwegian woods' sounding quite intriguing to me. Their deep electronic sound would've been much more fitting in a fully packed nightclub at 3AM, however, as I guess 11.30 is still a little early for a club act of this caliber to play their live set. The venue wasn't even half full as I entered, which was also another reason to why I left so early. Still, I'm quite excited to see what these guys are up to in the future.
Of Norway - Heathren Burial
I must admit that I had higher expectations to Bergen's previously electronic duo (now a band)
Put Your Hands Up For Neo-Tokyo, as they seemed relatively uninspired playing at the rather tiny venue with, to put it mildly, not exactly the best sound around. As they have by this day still only released three official songs, I had expected their set to be more in the vibes of electronica rather than noise, which they seemed to be putting a lot more focus on. Not that it's a negative thing, however — their newest track
The Ghost (below) sounds very promising, and hopefully we won't have to wait too long for their debut release either, but who knows really.
Put Your Hands Up For Neo-Tokyo - The Ghost
There couldn't have been a better way of ending the first day of Bylarm than to end it with
Lindstrøm together with
Diskjokke and
Todd Terje (going under the name
Smalltown Superstars), two other strong names in the Norwegian electronic and club scene. Not surprisingly, the half an hour long set was based down to one track, slowly evolving from Lindstrøm's dark and ocean deep electronic sound into highlights of what some may choose to call it -
space disco, where we can clearly hear the influences of Diskjokke and Todd Terje starting to take place. The whole set was nothing but a musical acid trip of few sorts, and also proved that three different electronic artists with each their different sound can go together and create something truly unique.
Metronomy - Heartbreaker (Diskjokke remix)
Todd Terje - Eurodans
Photography: Tonje Thilesen
For more photos, check out the whole set on our facebook page.
