IT'S BY:LARM AGAIN!
By:Larm is back in Oslo for the second year running. Whose idea was that?
For over a decade ByLarm has left a trail of destruction in its wake across Norway. For those ten years Scandinavia’s leading musical showcase has trampled city after city in its search for the finest in local music: Stavanger, Bergen, Tromsø, Trondheim and Kristiansand all hosted what people – well, me, anyway – referred to as ‘South By South West in the Snow’. Artists and execs flew in from miles around – it would be a bit stupid to fly in from less, after all, though perhaps not beyond the bounds of the music industry when you think about the mess it’s in right now – and found themselves seduced by Norway’s grand beauty, its people’s generosity and its hedonist culture.
But the news that ByLarm was no longer going to travel around Norway like a carnival – complete with attendant freaks and sideshows – came at me like a truck with headlights on full beam and snowplough sharpened. How would people like me ever be able to experience Norway if the existence of a music convention in the furthest reaches of the Arctic wasn’t there to justify the expense? What else was I going to look forward to in the grey month of February that could drag me from the grubby pile of CDs on my desk – most of which sounded like they’d been recorded in the sewers beneath Camden – and instead deposit me in a pale moonlit landscape filled with warped electronica, physically threatening mutant-metal, the sallow caresses of whispering voices and hip-hop in which references to snow had nothing to do with cocaine? Though I could hardly call myself a veteran of this fine event I felt slighted that they hadn’t at least discussed the decision with me.
As A&R for a now deceased (or barely breathing) little label with big ambitions I exercised a fascination with Scandinavian music, in which I recognised the kind of inventiveness that can turn rotten fish into an edible delicacy. I considered myself lucky when this growing obsession led to my first ByLarm after I stumbled on a band that insisted I travel to the event’s 2006 manifestation in Tromsø to see them play. But nothing had prepared me for the adventures that would follow when I stepped off the plane upon arrival in that northern city. No one had informed me that the streets are so icy that I wouldn’t even make it from the bus to the hotel lobby without falling flat on my arse. Nobody thought to tell me that the sight of grown men engaged in a bollocks-kicking wrestling match at 3am is a cause for celebration rather than pant-wetting fear. And the water bottle that was passed to me after I’d soaked in a hot tub in the snowy hills outside the city limits definitely offered no warning that it contained 95% proof moonshine. That weekend was a one of endless surprises, and ByLarm was etched into my diary for life. Oh, and I signed the band.
I travelled to Trondheim the next year, another city smothered in snowdrifts where I ate reindeer steaks and enjoyed the riches of the Scandinavian music scene in the confines of a former Nazi U-Boat factory, one whose foundations were so strong that the explosives necessary to destroy it would demolish the city itself before they even took out the building’s supporting walls. I can barely remember where I stayed that year: possibly I didn’t go to bed the whole weekend. Loney Dear were astonishing, though.
And yet, when the ByLarm authorities told me that I’d be travelling to Oslo for 2008, I wasn’t sure I wanted to bother. Oslo’s got its strengths, don’t get me wrong. The crayfish sandwiches in the Bristol Hotel justify its existence alone. Then there’s the existence of a 7 Eleven on every corner, the music policy of Mono, and the most beautiful specimens of humanity everywhere you look. But it wasn’t like I was going to end up huskie-sledging by night, or skating from one venue to the next in my rush to discover another absurdly named ska-country combo. I was going to have to focus on the music, and as any fool in this business knows, no one cares about music anymore. Not unless you’re listening to it somewhere like a wooden tee-pee with snow falling through a chimney out of which smoke curls from a log fire on which coffee is brewing.
Those same ByLarm authorities admitted soon afterwards that their plan for the future was to make Oslo ByLarm’s home. I tapped my head to indicate that they were lunatics, though their English is so perfect I suspect that was unnecessary. I begged them to send us to Kautokeino instead: I’d never been to Finnmark and wanted to drive snowmobiles. What about Bodø? We could take a boat ride out to the Lofoten Islands and catch cod in their breeding grounds. Or wouldn’t Bergen be nice, with its wooden houses, fish market, and the promise of trips into the fjords? But Oslo? Where was the adventure in that?
SEEING THE WOOD FOR THE TREES
It didn’t take long to forgive them. That first night in Oslo I watched Truls & The Trees, a ramshackle nine piece fronted by a peculiarly angel-voiced overgrown boy scout. I’d already spent the afternoon being charmed by the sweetly French sounds of Maria Due and the minimal Kate Bush-isms of Maose, before stopping off at Rockefeller, where All That And A Bag of Chips had at least proven that a terrible name didn’t mean terrible music (though they were pushing their luck none the less). From the other side of the city I received an excitable text message from a friend who’d just witnessed a band who’d blown his mind: he thought they were called Kaka Motherfucker, though they later turned out to sport an only slightly more commercially friendly name, Kakkmaddafakka. But Truls & The Trees awoke in me a fresh excitement that normally I could only have expected from an oily massage in the Arctic snow. They also reminded me of the most important thing I learned that weekend: that there’s more to ByLarm than illegal moonshine, top quality fish and twenty hours of darkness a day. By Gum, ByLarm, there’s the music!
I realised, as Truls’ falstetto cuckooed through what I soon learned was an album highlight called Upside Journey, that amidst the madness of the North and beneath the midday moon I’d forgotten what first took me to Tromsø for ByLarm: music by one of the most inspirational and unusual bands I had ever heard. I’d only come across them after falling for another Norwegian act, whose shoegazing revivalism was scuffed up magically by an obsession with avant-garde noise. They in turn had only been brought to my attention after a colleague introduced me to a swathe of exciting bands that had all emerged from her home town of Bergen, forcing me to concede that Abba, Aha and Aqua were not the be-all and end-all of Scandinavian music. Truls, I recognised, brought on that rush that only flourishes when you discover something truly special. He took me back to Tromsø, to seeing the band I later signed perform for the first time, and maybe even further, to the day I first experienced the magic of their album. From there he helped me trace a line back to the reason I first looked to Scandinavia: it’s a source of music as pure as a bottle of Voss. Scandinavia pumps out great acts like America pumps out ozone depleting toxins.
HAT’S ENERTAINMENT
Luckily for us, wherever ByLarm lays its woollen hat, that’s its home. Because that’s what ByLarm is about: the music. And only a fool forgets about the music, right? While none of us here really know how we’re going to keep our jobs much longer than the end of next month, and many of us wonder what we’ll do if we can no longer work with the one thing that’s filled our every waking hour since we first turned on a radio, we all know that music is going to be around for ever, and as fans, first and foremost, we’re driven to find that music. It doesn’t matter where we see it. It simply matters that it’s good.
As it happens, ByLarm in Oslo was as memorable as every ByLarm I’ve so far attended, and I expect this to be the same in 2009. I’ve already taken those shadowy ByLarm authorities to one side and apologised that I could ever have doubted them. (As punishment they’ve banished me to a remote Arctic island during the summer, but since it turns out to be the home of the Træna Festival I think I’m quids in.) In 2008 I might not have rolled naked down a frozen hillside or sucked the marrow from reindeer bones, but I did see Lykke Li on the top floor of a tower block overlooking the city centre, and I surprised everyone by discovering a hitherto-undetected love of Faroese garage rock. That’s why I’m confident that this weekend promises more surprises than Britney’s friend Amy, because within the borders of the Nordic countries there are whole packs of satan-worshipping metalheads, pitifully-shaven country revivalists, mad-eyed electronic scientists and doe-eyed bed-headed blonde guitarists looking to expand our musical minds until they burst.
So call me a ByLarm bore, if you like, as I regale you with stories of the good old days, and you can even question why the apparently wonderful artists I’ve championed haven’t sailed into international waters with their flags flapping proudly in the breeze – you’ve only got yourselves to blame, if you ask me. But don’t expect me to claim that ByLarm isn’t like it used to be. Because it is. It’s a little bit warmer here in Oslo, perhaps, and it’s definitely a little bit bigger, but it’s always been the home of everything that’s great about Scandinavian music. It proves that it’s not about where you’re at, and only a little about where you’re from. What it’s really about is where you’re coming from, and where you’re going. Frankly, I don’t care where I am as long as what I’m hearing has the ability take me away from it. After all, as the old saying goes back in what was once known as Great Britain: why look at the mantelpiece when you’re poking the fire?
Wyndham Wallace is a debonair freelance journalist who is also available for naked hot-tubbing, karsk-fuelled pagan rituals and sledge-racing down the Svartisen Glacier. He is currently single and quite likes music, food and travel.
Feature: It's by:Larm Again! (by:Larm News)
