For a city boasting mostly low-level historic buildings, Stockholm’s Skrapan is a dramatic aberration – a cultural icon featuring stunning views of this 769-year old town. Once emblematic of the power of the Swedish tax authority, it has today been converted into student housing. It is here, tucked away on the seventeenth floor, where we recorded our first two live singles:
Old Devil Midnight and
Life Within, Pt. 1. The idea behind the installation was to embrace the odd dystopian vibe of the building, creating a kind of meta feeling. To this end, we filmed a time-lapse sequence of the actual view from the room, which we projected inside the room.
This new set-up is largely due to a brilliant idea from Daniel A Söllscher, a long-time friend who is well-regarded for his dance music project
NEAT. Incredibly, right at the time we were doing this, he was aired by Pete Tong on BBC Radio 1! I’m so proud of him! (Laughs). For our show, he controlled the backing track and all the beats with his drum machines, Anton Sandqvist played the piano, and I used my guitar and voice FXs. This was all pre-programmed so we could easily adapt the live show to a forty-square-metre apartment on the seventeenth floor. It turned out very Cabaret Voltaire with The Chameleons type of delayed melodies.