in briefrelease

Ecstasy After the Party

Olof Dreijer: »Loud Bloom«

With the debut album Loud Bloom, Olof Dreijer – best known from The Knife – comes across as someone who never quite realised the party was over. Or perhaps realised it before everyone else did.

For years, club music has been absorbed into popular culture and its aesthetic vocabulary – imported into the pop song as energy, irony, and texture through artists like Charli XCX, PC Music, and the entire hyperpop complex. On Loud Bloom, the opposite happens. This is not club music disguised as pop, but pop music subjected to the temporality of the club: circular, lingering, and uninterested in quick release.

Dreijer understands something essential about repetition – the melodies are catchy without being insistent. »Rosa Rugosa«, »Plastic Camelia«, and »Cassia« are instantly memorable, yet the melodies never harden into slogans. The sonic palette is airy and almost devoid of chordal surfaces. Steel drums, gleaming synth figures, pitched tom-toms, and sub-bass drift lyrically through the music, while castanets and cowbells flicker at the edges. Even the vocals function more as texture than as centre.

The album feels constantly in motion, as though its melodies are being refracted through prisms that continuously produce new luminous surfaces. On »Lantana«, tones drift away from their point of departure like blurred watercolours – not quite microtonal, but with a sense of intonation as something fluid. Precisely for that reason, one occasionally misses an element of estrangement. In The Knife, Karin Dreijer’s voice functioned as a disturbing counterforce – androgynous, childlike, threatening. On Loud Bloom, the sonic world is more homogeneous and smoothed out.

Still, the album feels like an heir to the half-clubbed, half-pop kaleidoscopic computer music of the mid-2010s – albums such as Our Love by Caribou and In Colour by Jamie xx – music that dared to be melodic without the safety net of irony. Dreijer’s music believes in ecstasy as a gentle experience. It is music meant for dancing, yet somehow shy at the very thought of celebration.

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek

playlist

24.04.2025

My name is Bastian Zimmermann – would you like to see my playlist?

»A lot is projected onto music and making music – I'm careful, singing doesn't make you more intelligent and certainly doesn't make you a better person. It's like in sexuality. A lot of things go very consciously wrong for some people. Music like sex are means of communication, people come into contact and negotiate with each other and their instruments/tools and meet themselves in it. This is also the case when I listen to music – from every conceivable genre and context, even if I always notice that as a teenager I used to play a lot of jazz guitar.«

Bastian Zimmermann lives in Munich and works freelance in the areas of music and performance. As a dramaturge, he works with artists such as the soloist ensemble Kaleidoskop, Yael Ronen and Neo Hülcker. He is editor of the German speaking magazine Positionen – Texts on Current Music and curates projects such as »Music for Hotel Bars« and the festival Music Installations Nuremberg festival. His focus is on social aspects of making music, experimental music concepts and the questioning of bourgeois structures in contemporary music. In Spring 2025 he will take over the Wolke Verlag publishing house for books on music with Patrick Becker.

playlist

24.04.2025

My name is Sanne Krogh Groth – would you like to see my playlist?

»Music to me is… my work. I've landed in the best job in the world, where a core task is to discover new music, to learn its internal logic and aesthetics, who created it, and why. I'm a music researcher and have just returned from the island of Java in Indonesia with my research partner and husband Nils, where we've been visiting experimental musicians in Yogyakarta – artists we've now followed for seven years.
One recurring theme is the trance/horse dance jathilan (or jaranan), which several of the artists have introduced us to. Jathilan is on one hand an old Javanese ritual, and on the other hand a contemporary (village) culture in full development. There is no single historically 'correct' jathilan. It's a practice that follows an old spiritual ritual, but is also open to current Indonesian influences.

The playlist consists of three tracks by Senyawa, Gabber Modus Operandi, and Raja Kirik, all of whom have incorporated the ritual into their music. The fourth track was supposed to be a 'traditional' jathilan, but as far as I know, no such recording exists on Spotify. Instead, I found a related jaranan piece that includes a dangdut song – an ultra-popular genre that is often performed as part of a jathilan event. The final track is one of the most popular dangdut songs at the moment.«

Sanne Krogh Groth is Associate Professor of Musicology at Lund University, Sweden, where she conducts research on electronic music and sound art, currently with a focus on Indonesia. Sanne was editor-in-chief of Seismograf from 2011–2019. In 2015, she established Seismograf Peer, which she is still the managing editor of.

playlist

24.04.2025

My name is Liza Sirenko – would you like to see my playlist?

»For me, music is work and a way to escape it. Music is the fanciest way of communication and therefore the most delicious food for analysis. It is what prolongs your feeling for longer than you can physically hold. Music is something after which you say: 'I’m glad you didn’t use words'. After all, it’s something that makes your commute or chores shorter, and this time-controlling function is the very first and foremost mystery I love about it.«

Liza Sirenko is a music theorist and music critic from Kharkiv, Ukraine. She is a co-founder and board member of the Ukrainian media about classical music The Claquers. She is a former Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Center, CUNY (New York, USA), and a graduate of National Music Academy of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine). Her current interests include processes in the classical music industry, contemporary opera in Ukraine, and a role of postcolonial moves in these. Liza is a former PR Director of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, currently working as a Program Officer at the Goethe-Institut Ukraine.

in brieflive

13.04.2025

»Is He Going to Play Three Pianos?«

August Rosenbaum: Klaverkoncert

DR Koncerthuset, 13.04

Sofus Preisel

»Is he going to play three pianos?« a boy asks. »Maybe he’s learned to play with his feet?« says an adult man. The audience on their way into the DR Concert Hall’s main auditorium comment on the setup for August Rosenbaum’s piano concert. Three Steinway grand pianos lined up is truly peculiar – actually comical.

When the concert began, I imagined I could hear differences between the instruments, though I would probably fail a blind test. Apart from a bit of playing with staccato on one piano and pedal on another, the setup was, frankly, underused. The piano playing was lacking, dominated by a single approach: pedal pressed all the way down, an active right hand primarily in the middle register, a left hand with a muted accompaniment, and a great deal of repetitive technique.

It felt like a gravity Rosenbaum could not escape. No idea or direction could break free; one always returned to the same place.

When there are two grand pianos for a concert, one of them is usually prepared. Rosenbaum had three (!) without using a single screw, coin, or ping-pong ball. Shouldn’t that be a criminal offense? Nor were any extended techniques employed, such as clusters or playing with the back of the hand.

The light show was charming, at times impressive. Still, it takes more goodwill than I possess to call the evening an audiovisual concert, as the program text told me it was. On the way out, I heard another man say, »It was actually quite exciting to hear him play.« I didn’t think so.

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek

in briefrelease

12.04.2025

Bumblebees Come With Punk

Smag På Dig Selv: »SPDS«

Stunt Records, 12.04

Kristoffer Møllegaard

Smag På Dig is pretty punk. True, the instruments most commonly associated with the genre have been replaced by saxophones, and yes, the music sounds markedly different from what one would normally link with punk. Nevertheless, with their debut release SPDS, tenor saxophonist Oliver Lauridsen, baritone and bass saxophonist Thorbjørn Øllgaard, and drummer Albert Holberg have created a bona fide, high-energy punk album – packed with fun, mischief, seriousness, and anger.

The style is established from the very first track. The trio plays catchy, often pop-inflected melodies built on Øllgaard’s thunderously deep saxophones, Holberg’s tight drumming, and Lauridsen’s high-energy, lyrical tenor sax. Particularly effective is »Middelklassen avler kun skeletter«, which has a comparatively darker tone, a bass sax buzzing like a fat, murderous bumblebee, and a stronger focus on atmosphere than many of the other tracks – without sacrificing melody.

At the other end of the spectrum are tracks like »PGO HOT 50«, with its stomping tempo, cowbells, and an epic sax guyfrom hell, and »Negirî«, which, with Luna Ersahin on vocals and saz in the eleventh hour, lets the horns step into the background – not to mention Thorbjørn’s angry poems, addressing everything from globalization, climate change, and war to the art academy and one’s own worth as a human being. Impressively, it all hangs together; everything works in its diversity. And it convincingly illustrates the age-old punk dictum that you can be angry and still have fun at the same time.