For 6 years brother duo ROCKETNUMBERNINE have been honing their unique sound. Starting off as an improv duo for the first 4 years, they decided to cross the sound over and turned heads very quickly – including those of the legendary Kieran Hebden Aka Four Tet and Gilles Peterson. The last 12 months has seen them record a session for Gilles at Radio 1 and perform at The BBC Worldwide Awards Ceromony, tour with both Four Tet and Caribou and perform in collaboration with Four Tet at The Mutek Festival in Montreal. Their first single released on Kieran’s Text label – a 14 minute opus laid down in one take with no overdubs was greatly received.

Now to 2011, having already opened for Radiohead in NYC with Fourtet, at the request of Thom Yorke himself. November 7th sees them release their next single with Soul Jazz – 3 self produced tracks, again one takes with no overdubs…ready to cross over into the clubs. This is their drum heavy, electronic intensity in full flow and 2012 will no doubt see RocketNumberNine destined for bigger things

Celebrating the release of their new album Aabenbaringen over aaskammen, CASIOKIDS announce a show at The Shacklewell Arms in November.

SOLD OUT

Here’s a little Q & A by band members Seth (Q’s) & Ketil (A’s):

Q: Why was “Aabenbaringen over aaskammen” chosen as the album title?

A: The song themes and sounds on the album are shaped around and inspired by the story of adventurer Dr. Tarzan Monsoon, and his discovery of a hidden rainforest. ‘Aabenbaringen’ translates to ‘the revelation’, and ‘over aaskammen’ as ‘over the mountain’, something that appears from over the mountain top. Two of the words are written in old Danish-Norwegian with the double A, instead of the more common modern-Norwegian Å, and a ‘B’ to replace the more modern-Norwegian ‘P’ in ‘aabenbaringen’. This gives the title a hint of being older, in Norwegian grammatical terms, 100 years or so.

Q: What was the writing process like? How did writing for an album differ from the past few years where you were just writing singles?

A: The writing and production are shared by Fredrik, Omar, Kjetil and myself (Ketil). This time around we did the main chunk of recording within a 3 month period, very different from our record-and-run schedule on earlier output. Doing the recordings within the same timeframe (bar a US-Norway-Mexico-Russia weekend tour in April) left us more focused in the studio, shaping ideas from sketches into the finished songs with the whole album in mind. We wanted this to feel more like an ALBUM, and we knew we had to finish it before friends started to forget our names (again).

Q: If you could pick one song on “Aabenbaringen over aaskammen” that you’re most proud of, what would it be and why?

A: This is the kind of thing that will often change, depending on when songs were made and the situations related to them, but if you ask me today I would say “Selskapets triste avslutning”. Not only was it the last song to make the cut on the album and perhaps then also most fresh for me, but how it came together was in many ways a bundle of luck and joy. I had the idea for a lyric and suddenly discovered a sketch Omar and Fredrik had been working on which had been filed away in the ‘maybe?’ pile. I browsed through some sketches to try my idea, and this ‘maybe?’ one fitted together almost immediately with the vocal melody and the build-up of my lyrics. Right after this little discovery the entire of Montreal collective was visiting our tiny studio in Bergen, and “Selskapets triste avslutning” was one of the songs Kevin Barnes, K Ishibashi, Bryan Poole and the others helped us on the most.

Q: There are new kinds of songs and instruments on this album compared to your previous output. What was the reason to expand your palette with new song styles and new instrumentation?

A: Our first release “Fück MIDI!” was done mainly in Fredrik’s father’s office in Stavanger, the second album “Topp stemning på lokal bar” was done in an old cantina and in the hallway of the Bergen Jazz Association, whilst on this record we wanted to sit in our little grotto at Bergen Kjøtt (Bergen Meat) studio and dig a bit deeper and experiment more with production possibilities. For me the production sounds richer, a natural development as all of us are more used to recording and more eager to find possibilities with the equipment we’ve gathered (stolen) over the years. Fans of our earlier recordings (and fellow workers at Fredrik’s father’s office) will not be disappointed though, as we´re bound to remain categorized in the lo-fi-electro genre (forever). Even though we’ve become more interested in production possibilities, we still want to retain the rawness of the first two records. The dulcet tones of the Casio will always be at the core of our manifesto.

SUPPORTING ACTS:

ELEPHANT

French-by-way-of-Pontefract chanteuse Amelia Rivas met Christian Pinchbeck back in May 2010, since when they’ve been quietly creating some hauntingly fragile songs with a sense of mystery and history that belies their teenage years.