Music
Copenhagen; you might have heard of its music scene? Over the last couple of years Denmark’s capital has become synonymous with arty musical cool, home to acts like ML Buch, Smerz and Erika De Casier, all of whom offer up fun, experimental takes on pop dripping with palpable Nordic chic. However, every great scene needs its enfant terribles, its mischievous party starters, the ones that want to push the night out beyond euphoric early hours in the club and into the unknown confines of the next day after-party.
Enter Farveblind. The trio, comprised of Jens Asger Lykkeboe Mouritzen, Magnus Pilgaard Grønnebæk, and Anders Norre Arendt, revel in crafting mercurial, energetic bangers, the kind that can variously be termed ‘electro-punk’, ‘rave-rock’ or even ‘big beat’. Imagine a more eclectic The Chemical Brothers (whose long-time producer Steve Dub has been working with the trio for a number of years) mixed with a less arch Viagra Boys and you’re sort of there.
They’ve been a band since 2015, spending much of the pre-COVID years lighting up festivals across Denmark. Check out this video for evidence that they’ve always had the juice, even in their earliest formation. The last few of years have seen the trio reach new heights, playing key European festivals like Reeperbahn and Eurosonic, hitting the UK for the first time and recording an album (‘Micro Pleasures’, out this Friday) that features the collaborations from Django Django, K.Flay, Foreign Air and numerous others.
CLASH caught-up with the rising party-starters to talk electro-punk influences, their love of festivals, their dream live show and, of course, the much-vaunted Copenhagen music scene…
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I love your name, is there a thematic idea behind it or does it just sound cool?
Magnus: Neither! [laughs]. Nah we originally used it as a temporary name, then things happened really quick and we got a manager and the first thing we said was “should we change it?” But he said “absolutely not”.
Jens: People really stumble over the first half of it.
This is possibly a dull question for you, but it’s important; what’s your deep origin story? How did you guys form?
Jens: Me and Anders went to boarding school together, we all played in rival bands. But we thought we needed to form a collective to annihilate all the competition. Me and Magnus started working together but we were really bad [laughs]. Years later, when we teamed up with Steve Dub, he tried to teach us how to make music, but we still had to get Anders on board. He’s the songwriter in the band.
Anders: That’s a bit of an overstatement, but I’ll take it. I joined in late 2018. We were sharing the same studio and they asked if I wanted to play bass. I come from a punk background, so I thought “electronic music is shit but I’ll do it for fun”. We played a show, then I realised we weren’t going home that night, so I stayed on the tour. I guess I never went home.
Magnus: We released some tunes before Anders joined, but at that point we mainly released music just so we could play shows. We played the biggest festival in Northern Europe twice with only one EP out. It was all about “how can we play more live shows?”
You talked about a punk background, your sound definitely fits the ‘electro-punk’ mould. What were your formative influences or experiences in those two genres?
Magnus: We grew accustomed to it. We were born two years before The Prodigy released ‘The Fat Of The Land’. Just today, actually, we did an interview about that record and its influence on us. We were born too late to understand that era of rave and rock, but we grew up on the later part of it; nu metal, as well as our families being into the earlier rave music. Linkin Park was also probably my gateway into electro-rock stuff. At some point I just realised “fuck, it’s all the same”.
Jens: It’s all about energy. The stuff that makes you feel like Tuesday is a Friday. Nineties rave, big beat, industrial, punk; it all fulfills that. We were also at Roskilde Festival and we caught a death metal show and that was our vibe too.
Magnus: I think that’s why we had success, when we were starting out. We weren’t that good, but we had that energy that was fun to watch live.
Anders: Live music is a visual medium.
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You guys really feel like a band that writes music with the specific intention of playing it live.
Magnus: It’s just impossible for us not to think about it.
Jens: It’s been really interesting creating this album, because it’s the first time we’ve actually just focused on specific songs and trying to get out of that frame of reference and imagine what the listener might feel. But I still feel like thinking about the live setting is the right way for us to write music.
I was watching videos today of you from back in 2017 playing at SPOT Festival…
Magnus: We just played it again this weekend!
Oh wow. How much do you think you have or maybe haven’t developed as a band since 2017?
Magnus: We have confidence now. Confidence in producing music as well as playing live. We know what to do now, which is a good thing [laughs].
Jens: We also gave up on trying to make the music we thought people would want. We realised we weren’t good enough, so we focused on our own stupid vibe. That’s produced the best results, by far.
What’s your current live set-up? In your older videos you’re more of a traditional band, but I saw that recently you played what looked more like a DJ set with live bass.
Magnus: There’s some practical elements to it, if you’re touring with just a mixer. But it’s crazy fun exploring how to get that same energy with the DJ set up and Anders playing bass and synth. We did a small support tour, 4/5 days, where we tried it and people reacted like it was a live act. We’re still exploring.
What would be your dream live show?
Magnus: Glastonbury? [laughs]
Anders: Or a show where we could fly in all our features. One big fucking get-together. The logistics would be crazy.
Magnus: The mood would be crazy. That backstage area would be insane. We’ve played a lot of festivals. I’d love to play a big festival, at night time, with a huge budget; lasers everywhere. I want an infinite amount of money and we can use it all on gear [laughs].
Jens: Festivals are great. It’s a theme of the album; these short moments in life that give us a break from the hamster wheel we’re all trying to get out of.
Is that what the title of the album refers to?
Magnus: Definitely. One more thing about festivals; the audiences are there to be entertained but it’s not a “this will make or break my day” kind-of thing. They can always just go see something else. It’s supposed to just be enjoyed and it’s so forgiving. I love going to festivals myself because even if my favourite artist doesn’t do it for me, I can just go and see another one of my favourite artists.
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I want to talk to you about Copenhagen. I’m sure you know this but, in the UK, people see Copenhagen as having one of the coolest and most interesting music scenes on Earth. What are your insider feelings on that?
Anders: [Laughs] It’s funny, because the city’s not that big, everyone knows each other or uses the same sound guy or whatever. We played SPOT Festival this weekend and, like, everyone on the scene was there. So it’s hard for us to see it from the outside. They’re just bands that play around the corner. But we don’t feel particularly cool ourselves, I guess.
Magnus: Exactly, that Cph+ playlist that blew up on Spotify, with Smerz and Erika De Casier on it, these great artists are from the same university, they’re a very small clique. The cool term came from outside of Denmark, rather than inside. They were picked up outside of Copenhagen and suddenly they were the coolest people in the world.
Jens: We’ve got a good thing going. People want to help each other and there’s a good cross-genre community. Maybe because the market’s so small.
I also want to ask about the album. To what degree does the finished creation resemble the thing you imagined when you were writing and recording it?
Magnus: Anders had a good point about this earlier today.
Anders: There’s two schools of albums. There’s the ‘we’re going to do a coherent piece, song-by-song’ school. Then there’s the ‘we’re doing a bunch of songs that represent where we are as musicians, a collage’. The one we’ve created is the latter. We never sat down and said “we’re doing an album, here’s the concept”. We don’t work that way. We didn’t really think much at all about what it would ultimately be.
Jens: One of the joys of making the album was working with so many features. We have a thing where we want to be friends with the features as well. We get to have these amazing experiences with the collaborators when creating the songs. That led to the concept of ‘micro pleasures’. Each track is our micro pleasure!
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‘Micro Pleasures’ will be released on May 15th.
Words: Tom Morgan
Photo Credit: Noemi Kapusy
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