Monzano released their second album By This Time Last Year Everything Will Seem Younger February 8th this year. I’m too lazy to research, but with their six live sets they were probably the band with most spots during by:Larm last month. I met up with Sjur Lyseid, Eivind Bøe, Magnus Rauan and Eivind Almhjell just after one of their sound checks to chat about Oslo indie, their band, album and a tad of Little Hands of Asphalt.
Photo: Bård Sogge
Nö: Congrats on your second album. Was it as hard as they say it is?
Monzano: Thanks! It wasn’t really that hard. Magnus and Eivind where included in the band after the first album, so for them this is really the first album. That made it that much easier.
Nö: By this time last year everything will seem younger?
M: I was on the train on my way to Bergen when this TV screen with short news bulletins caught my eye. And one of the news stories said China’s foreign minister had stated that ‘by this time next year everything will be ok’. The original idea was to release an EP called that and then release this album a year later, but the EP never happened. I just thought it was so poetic that a foreign minister states that everything will be ok in a years time.
Sjur Lyseid goes on to tell me how when he was about 19, he had a huge Vonnergut period. And how the band name derives from his Cat’s Cradle novel where Monzano is the dictator of this island, but when he throws himself in the sea it freezes over.
Nö: And that’s descriptive of the band?
SL: I don’t know, I don’t think we’re the world’s most apocalyptic band. But there are a few apocalypse themes on the record. There are really only four things you can write music about: The sea, love, death and the apocalypse.
Nö: Do you find your inspiration through literature then? When I listened through your album, there’s a few themes I find you coming back to; nature, dreams and traveling, often by train. Is that something you choo-choo-choose as themes to write around?
SL: There are of course a lot of references in the lyrics, not only towards literature, but all forms of impressions. And as far as the subject matter goes, we started out working with travelling, time and restlessness as themes for this record. It’s not like we wanted to make a concept album, we just operated within a loose framework to tie the album together.
We also started working on the cover art early on to make it a whole. If we are to release it on vinyl, it’s going to look great, but I still like CD covers. I actually still use a Disc Man. I got one for Christmas. It’s really helpful as I worked in a record store for many years, and I’ve got a lot of CD’s. And I much rather take two CD’s with me when I leave home and concentrate on listening to those instead of having an iPod with so many songs to choose from.
Nö: You released a solo album last year as Little Hands of Asphalt. How do you juggle your solo career and playing in a band? And how do you know when you’ve made a song for Monzano instead of a song just for you and your guitar?
SL: This album, we all wrote. I didn’t write any of the songs by myself. It’s really a whole different way of writing music than with my solo project. On the Little Hands of Asphalt stuff, it’s just me playing songs in C or D major. But with Monzano it has a much more complex structure. I write the lyrics, but other than that it’s a collective effort. None of us could have written these songs by ourselves. [...] And if I’m going to be completely honest, I guess having a solo project where I decide everything makes me more open to this way of working in a band. I have another outlet for that kind of dictator behavior.
M: Of course it’s easier to be in a band if you feel that you can contribute instead of just being the backing band. And I think we’ve found that balance, ’cause we have the same ideas of what it should sound like. But we also bring different aspects to the table.
When interviewing Norwegian bands and listening through their discography, I keep coming back to how a lot of them are heavily inspired by 90s indie. I thought I wouldn’t ask the band about it in this interview, but before you could say Seattle, we were knee-deep in it.
SL: I think the aesthetics of a band forms when you first get together, and when I started this band I was really into American west coast indie. At the time Death Cab for Cutie was my little secret group from Seattle that no one had heard about. And then, you know, they grew into becoming a well-known band. That really gets to the indie elitist in me now.
M: The 90s indie bands never stopped releasing good records, and weren’t thrown off by trends and stuff like that. Also, that’s what we grew up with. If we had grown up with blues, I guess we would be a blues band.
Nö: So tell me more about the song The Nombers Game on your new album? Is it a tribute to the Norwegian band Nomber 5?
SL: I produced their record, and they’re good friends of ours. It’s not as much a tribute to them as it is a reference to them as well as Hiawata! and other bands from the Oslo indie scene.
Nö: Your entire new record is out on MySpace. Do you expect to make money on music?
SL: We have no ambitions to make money of music. As a principle I think the democratization of culture is not a bad thing. Also, there are other ways to make money from music than from records. It’s nice that people buy your records, but it’s nice because they want to listen to your music.
M: We just want people to hear our music. And when you get fan mail from some remote place you never have heard about, that’s when you realize the opportunities you have with promoting your music. When Sjur put out a Little Hands of Asphalt EP for download, it was downloaded over 30,000 times. And if you compare that to the number of records sold, there’s a remarkable difference. This also means that when we play Europe, there’s a lot of people coming out to see us that know our work already. And that’s more important than earning money off our records.
Nö: by:Larm!
M: First of all it’s a good place to be booked for festivals. But by:Larm has evolved to be more than a music industry festival. There’s a lot of regular concert goers here as well. When I’ve played by:Larm gigs earlier, I’ve felt that the audience have been an observing one.
We end our interview by talking about the Statoil grant. Sjur has been a voice for the skeptical mass of bands who don’t want to mix music with oil this year; “They should give the grant to by:Larm instead and use it to buy beer for all the bands. That way no one would say no to it. Except maybe all the straight edge bands. And Moddi.”.
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