Prinspóló is releasing one single and a video per month exclusively on gogoyoko and the first one, Föstudagsmessa, came out on January. The next one is set to be released next week and we can’t wait.

Motorpsycho

Death Defying Unicorn

Stickman; 2012

by Benedikt Reynisson

Buy and listen on gogoyoko.com

 
 
Norwegian Motorpsycho have made their most provoking and challenging album yet. A compelling mixture of psychedelic rock, avant-garde and jazzed up folk.
 

Originally NZCA/LINES was a guitar oriented project. Did you take a decision on ditching the guitars or did you slowly develop into the synth-driven pop band that NZCA/LINES is today?
 

I read someone saying that Charlie (Alex March, producer) told me to ditch the guitars and listen to Stravinsky. This is partially true. I had in fact already loved Stravinsky for years, and when we started making this record I went to see the Rite of Spring performed at the Coliseum, which was amazing. We worked on the record whilst living together in Clapton, London, where Charlie had his studio set up, with a couple of lovely Moog synths. We didn’t have the facility to record drums or record guitars very well, so we whacked on loads of Mini-Moog and saved up to buy an Akai MPC-60. So yes, it was slow; initially we thought some guitars would go on, but it became evident that they wouldn’t fit. As we started working on different songs of mine, I started to write in a different way. Truthfully, I got excited about music again, which I hadn’t done for a while.

 
NZCA/LINES the album is quite a grower, could you tell us a little how it was conceived?
 
After I dropped out of art college to play with Your Twenties, I’d wanted to approach making music in the same way as you’d approach a visual project. I never tried to overtly express myself with ‘art’, preferring to construct narratives and make work around that – why couldn’t you do the same with music? As we began to construct this record, I started listening to the pop and RnB music that I had secretly loved, rediscovering it – suddenly I saw how these stories could fit with the music. So the NZCA/LINES album is a loose concept record, based around the idea of New Magnetic North, a secret set of magnetic poles that are constantly moving. If you can navigate by these poles, you discover that they trace the shifting presence of invisible cities, places that exist only in relation to NMN. Each song on the record is involved in this narrative in some way, like different scenes from a film. It’s meant to sketch out a universe. The emotion comes naturally with the stories, and maybe they end up relating to me personally in some way. Hopefully, once you’ve listened to the album through a few times, you can feel this.
 

You’ve been compared artists like Passion Pit, Metronomy and Scritti Politti. Do these artists rank high in your music collection?
 
My prevailing memory of Scritti Politti is rather stereotypical – listening to Cupid & Psyche 85 on the night bus home. It’s a record I’ve listened to since my teenage years, and I bought it because I saw them playing Wood Beez on Top of the Pops 2 (I’m not old enough to know from first time around). I loved the myth that Green Gartside, after suffering crippling stage fright, had retired to his parent’s place in Wales and written a full manifesto why Scritti should transform from a scratchy post-punk project into a pop machine. It’s that kind of thought and intention in music that really gets me – nothing is arbitrary. Also, Gartside took what was essentially the music of black America and used it for his own means, continuing a legacy of plagiarism dating back to The Beatles – I’m guilty of the same crime. However, someone recently compared NZCA to Scritti because it was ‘pop music with a subtext’, which is more flattering! I’ve known about and listened to Metronomy since the beginning, obviously, because of my connection to it. I’m influenced by similar sources, but there’s no intention to sound similar. I like Passion Pit, I’d like the NZCA/LINES live show to be as fun as theirs. Generally I love pop and electronic music. Recently I’ve been into DMX Krew again, also The-Dream and The Weeknd , and I’ve been listening to some great Acid mixes too.
 

 
Your band name is inspired from the ancient geoglyphs in the Peruvian Nazca Desert (correct me if I‘m wrong). Are you in some ways trying to accommodate something supernatural and unknown with your music? Should I play your album backwards?
 

You’re damn right. If you play Work backwards there’s actually a recipe for a really great vegetable soup. But yes, I’m fascinated by psychological/spiritual science fiction concepts, such as the films Solaris and Fata Morgana, or the paper architecture of Etienne Louis-Boullee. I love the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, such as ‘The Library of Babel’ or ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. I always find the human reality of things like the Nazca Lines far more compelling than any conspiracy theorie though. Drawings by aliens? No, just clever people with a brilliant knack for futility. They made these beautiful drawings that they could never see, they could never verify them or spoil themselves with pride looking at them. This is very poetic.
 

You’ve been receiving good publicity in France; do you fit well with France’s electro-pop scene?
 
Myself and Charlie actually talked about making the album ‘sound French’ during the recording stage, so it’s remarkable that such a sexy, relaxed country has taken a liking to NZCA/LINES. When the French get music right you certainly know about it, and there’s little that can be done to match it when that happens. Take the recent track by Kavinsky and Lovefoxxx, produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, or Daft Punk’s soundtrack to Tron. I’m hoping we can build up a good relationship with France, because when you tour over there the food is amazing.
 

How do you feel about the London music scene today and last few years, do you think it’s on a good pace?
 
The London music scene is remarkably healthy. I did move down here shortly after the long, hot summer of 2006, when it seemed like everyone was on a bit of a comedown, but now things seem positive again. There’s a funny, sprawling family tree of bands I know who have members from Devon (my home county). There’s the two other original members of Your Twenties aside from myself and Gabriel are James and Robin, the former now in Veronica Falls, the latter in Male Bonding – two great bands. I also played with James in The Proper Ornaments for a while, with Wes from Let’s Wrestle. Charlie’s mixing Props and Veronica Falls stuff, whilst Ash Workman mixed the Metronomy stuff and has engineering Gabriel’s new project, Night Works. Everyone helps each other out.
 

 
Do you have any thoughts on free streaming and file sharing regarding music? Is it good or bad?
 
It’s a difficult topic. There’s little you can do to stop it, which means that good or bad, it’s a symptom of this new media that must be accommodated rather than fought. I don’t see how companies can clamp down on file-sharing and making people pay, realistically. This is a brutal reality. But it’s interesting when you see people like The Weeknd putting their records up to stream track-by-track off Soundcloud, or Shabbazz Palaces putting their full album stream on Youtube. It puts the emphasis more on things you can’t pirate, like live performances which in turn have to be more compelling and unique. Marshall McCluhan said that we ‘march backward into the future’ – we can only perceive the effects of a new technology after the fact. I think in the next decade or two we’ll see a distinct evolution of how people consume music.
 

Last but not least, what’s up next? Do you have big plans for this year?
 
We’re finishing editing the video for Okinawa Channels that I made with some friends, and hopefully that will be up next week. We’ve got an exciting couple of months for shows: we’re playing in France on the 17thand 19th of Feb, then at the Royal Albert Hall on the 22nd with Maria Minerva, followed by a show with Icona Pop on the 28th. Then we’re doing a headline Time Out show in March, followed by supporting Of Montreal in London and France in April. The album’s out February 27th, so get ready!
 

Review by Natalia Skoczylas
Photos by Paweł Páll Ævar
 
Yesterday night, opinions were strongly divided on the topic of the show. Some of us were surprised by the level of supporting bands – Phia and Owls of the Swamp turned out to be intriguingly good in their own ways. Phia seemed to me like new incarnation of Feist’s spirit, delicate, a bit neurotic and with remarkable sparks of sense of humor. Her show, consisting mostly of sampling vocals and instruments, was minimalistic and intense at the same time. I guess the whole Tektura was touched and we stood in silence for the whole performance, until she sang “Paper Planes” in the end. We couldn’t resist clapping our hands a bit in the end.
 
And then we met another Australian musician – Owls of the Swamp, looking like Johnny Depp playing in “Dead Man”. Anyhow, it also turned out to be really pleasant time – filled with small, funny talks in between, stories from tours, some anecdotes and happily finding a name for his guitar (which is now called Tektura and believe me, he’s able to pronounce it very well). And his music was also very nicely, smoothly done – with clear, pleasant vocals, basic singer-songwriter set-up, all about love and rivers. Impossible not to drown a bit.
 
And finally there was Myrra Rós – who already warmed up singing back vocals for Owls. She stood on the “scene”, which means a piece of floor in the club, took her guitar, asked her companion to grab instruments, and gave us a small recital of songs from the album Kveldúlfur. It was magnetic: beautifully sang (I wonder if it’s only my impression that Myrra’s vocal is probably the blackest one that far North?), nicely played with two guitars and basic drum kit, interrupted by small jokes with this amazing Icelandic sense of humor. The funniest moment was although kept for the end – Myrra liked the public obviously enough to sing for the encore a song by Polish band Bajm called “Kocham Cię” (the joke had many sites, adding that this song is completely infamous example of Polish pop, and that the singer of the band comes from Lublin and lives there all her life). Anyway, she did it very well, making the song even more pleasant by this little bit of exotic accent. Wonderful.