The Swedish taboo
by RAF KATIGBAK
Sweden’s busiest and most prolific techno producer is about to take a production break. Not because he wants to, but more because he has to. Over the phone from his studio in Stockholm, the many-faceted Håkan Lidbo revealed to the Mirror that during the next two weeks, instead of banging out funky electro-lounge, minimal click house, or Latin-based techno, his studio will be banging with the sound of carpenters installing a new floor.
“There’s no point in starting a new production, I have to unplug everything and I just have one room so I’ll be totally disconnected for a few weeks,” he says in a voice that sounds disappointingly unlike the Muppets Swedish Chef. For some, two weeks may not seem like a lot of time. But for Lidbo, an admitted workaholic, 14 days away from his sampler and workstation seem like an eternity (he averages a new release every two weeks and has well over 150 titles under his belt).
It seems that there’s no rest for the wicked, so Lidbo will be using the time to play various live shows throughout Europe and North America. One of those shows will be here in Montreal, where he will celebrate the launch of his Fishingindeepwaters album, a compilation of deep minimal dancefloor tech-house released on local imprint Trigger Recordings.
Aside from home-improvement matters, the Mirror and Lidbo discussed concept albums, picking carrots and the truth behind the mysterious Bobby Trafalgar.
Mirror: When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut. Obviously that didn’t go exactly as planned. Did you always dream about making music?
Håkan Lidbo: Not when I was a kid, but I think some of the reasons I began producing music with electronic equipment were pretty much the same reasons you wanted to be an astronaut - you get to wear really cool clothes and work with high-tech, rocket-type things. When I first saw Kraftwerk and Yello play, I was blown away because I thought that it was amazing to be able to work with these computers and machines with knobs. And you know, for me, to have a job where you feel very cool is pretty important.
M: I suspect more than a few people get into techno for the same reason, although they might not admit it so readily.
HK: Well, let me tell you, I’ve had other jobs, like picking carrots at a farmer’s place and working as a mailman on a bicycle, and I didn’t feel extremely cool doing that.
M: I suppose it’s hard to score with chicks when you roll up to them on a 10-speed rocking a sack of Ikea catalogues.
HK: Yeah, the coolest job for me, at a certain age, was to work with a synthesizer. I guess it wasn’t only the music, but it was also the fetishism, if you can call it that.
The Manilow factor
M: How many different pseudonyms have you used over the years?
HK: Maybe 10 or 12.
M: Whoa. That seems like a lot.
HK: That’s actually not that many. I know people with even more names. It’s funny because I’m actually more criticized for using my real name for most of my projects, from very experimental to funky and melodic projects. From a record label or a distributor’s point of view, I understand the problem - it’s just easier to market it that way.
M: Speaking of marketing, do you ever do commercial work?
HK: If the product is good, I don’t mind having my music in commercials. I actually won an award for best song for a TV commercial in Sweden. That was a big hit. Sweden is a small country and we sold, like 10,000 copies of the single. I think what’s most important is to spread different music to average people. It’s more important than supporting DJs and music freaks who’ll dig it up anyway.
M: I hear you’re into bootlegs too. What was the last one you did?
HK: I did one as Alvarez de Jesus on a label called Che. It was a Madonna song, from Madonna’s Holiday. The song was called “All Around the World.” I also did a very illegal cover, or sample, song of Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana.”
M: Barry Manilow, huh? That’s funny because, on your Web site, you describe your music as intelligent, serious and funky, yet I find there’s a lot of humour in there as well.
HK: I hope so. Some of the minimal stuff maybe isn’t that humorous. But I still think that music must be entertaining, at least for myself to listen to. You can easily make a really effective dancefloor song - just a kick and a nice bass and high hat and there it is, it goes on for six minutes and that would be a perfectly great track. But I insist on creating small details that make it interesting enough to listen to at home or in the headphones, and hopefully those details won’t destroy the club factor either. You mustn’t forget that music is about entertainment. Someone is always supposed to listen to it and if you bore that person to death, you’ve failed. You can’t just do it for yourself. You must keep things happening all the time to keep their attention. It’s like when you’re telling a story, if you don’t have a punchline, people will be leaving.
Chinese P-funk and the Romanian maestro
M: Many of your projects are stories in themselves, involving different mysterious personalities with elaborate histories like, for example, your Bobby Trafalgar project where you “remixed” this obscure Romanian composer. My first question is, is Bobby Trafalgar real?
HK: I can’t answer that. No offence, but I made a promise to myself - or to Bobby. There are some interesting discussions on the Net, people can’t seem to find the original records that were referred to on the cover. All that I can tell them is, look harder.
M: Fair enough, but how about that Action Music label you were involved in? You’re not going to tell me that there really was an underground Chinese P-funk movement in the ’70s, are you?
HK: (laughing) Yeah, that idea was so absurd. I was speaking to a friend and the idea just popped up. Sometimes if you take a silly idea and try to see it from a different perspective and bring some order into it, suddenly it might make a bit of sense. Unfortunately it didn’t sell anything, so we closed the label.
M: Looking at these things, the Bobby Trafalgar, the Action Music label, I’m getting the impression you enjoy messing with people’s heads.
HK: To be honest, it isn’t any master plan. I would love to have a connection between these projects, like Peter Greenaway films, but I pretty much make it up as it comes. Eventually I would like to do a series of concept albums, like back in the day when they made fusion albums with a big theme, like Stockhausen’s The Planets.
M: Sure, I can just imagine it. Håkan Lidbo’s Journey to the Heart of Uranus. Techno’s answer to Rick Wakeman, pretty high-concept stuff.
HK: If music is complicated, it’s always good to leave the listeners with a key, something to listen for. If it’s just there, if you’re in the supermarket and the music’s coming from the speakers, you don’t care about it. But if you listen to music and you have a key to how to listen to it, I think you can enjoy it much more. If you listen, for example, to a piece of classical music and someone tells you, “When the composer did this, he was almost deaf and then he died two years later,” then you might listen with a different perception.
M: It sounds like why or how the music is made is just as important to you as the music itself.
HK: I love buying records from flea markets and finding old composers and reading something strange about their lives, like maybe they didn’t make music at all, but ran a gas station in Oklahoma - I just love that stuff. Naturally, I like the stories behind Bobby Trafalgar or Action Music. It just makes the albums feel a bit bigger. In reality, I’m just a Swedish dude. I’m not that interesting. But if you create these stories, I think that maybe your record can gain some kind of magic.
---
Declassifying Håkan Lidbo's numerous secret identities
Lidbo’s got more fully-formed alter-egos than that strange, bald puppet Hugo that Kenner Toys used to make in the ’70s. Here’s a rundown for the benefit of techno-heads and international police agencies alike.
Bobby Trafalgar (Repap): Romanian defector pianist-arranger and ex-transvestite musical genius.
The Vanisher (Fragile/Transmat): Innovative soulful techno from the heart of Detroit… or is it?
Monsoon (Driftwood): aka Dr. Who, the mystery man on the label rife with aliases.
Royal Flesh (Drought): A sassy and twisted techno alter ego that puts the Lidbo in libido.
Alvarez de Jesus (Che/Street Knowledge): Bootleggin’, gun-totin’ Spaniard with a penchant for Madonna.
The Alpha Male (Scatalogics): Euro new-wave electro pop star - think Commodore 64 meets Visage.
Data 80 (Force Tracks): A Japanese computer program that suddenly becomes conscious and starts making commercial dance music. Brilliant!
Stockholm Decadence (Frogman): A somewhat ironic name given the crappy state of the Swedish club scene.
Ho-Shang Ling-Bu (Action Music): Chinese cult figure who saw it all during the mysterious C-Funk era of the ’70s.
Messieur Lidboux (Plactown Sounds): Frenchman and Casanova, Messieur Lidboux will romance you.
Jell (X-Trax): House, deep and sticky, like the name.
---
from: http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/2003/013003/music_cover.html
