A couple weeks ago Øya Festival announced a poll on their site, where their audience got to choose which of 15 classic Motorpsycho albums the group will play at this summer’s festival.

Today the festival announced the winner, 1994’s Timothy’s Monster, an album that has been in the lead for weeks. The album was originally released as a double CD and triple LP, which means we have a good, long concert to look forwards to in August!

According to the Norwegian version of 1001 Albums You  Must Hear Before You Die (2006) Timothy’s Monster was “the bomb the blew all limits of what one could allow oneself to do on a Norwegian rock album”.

The album was recorded by Motorpsycho’s trio Bent Sæther, Snah and Ghebhart, with Lars Lien and Helge ‘Deathprod’ Sten, in Trondheim 1994, and was their first release on a major label (EMI). The first 11 songs are classic Motorpsycho rock bombarded by the band’s signature melodies, while the last four are longer, druggier compositions, drowning the listener  in Motorpsycho’s psychedelic universe.

“You gotta hang on to the trip you’re on”

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Winners of the prestigious Spellemann Awards; the Norwegian equivalent to the Grammy, were announced this weekend. Eurovision Song Contest winner Alexander Rybak was bestowed with the prestigious Spellemann of the Year award while veterans Jahn Teigen and Barry Matheson received the Honorary Award and Music Industry Award respectively.

Music video of the Year:
Donkeyboy - “Ambitions”

Hit of the Year:
Donkeyboy - “Ambitions”

Newcomer of the Year:
Donkeyboy

Spellemann of the Year:
Alexander Rybak

Honorary Award:
Jahn Teigen

Female Artist:
Noora Noor

Male Artist:
Sivert Høyem

Rock:
John Olav Nilsen & Gjengen

Pop group:
Montée

Elektronica:
Röyksopp

Popular music composers of the Year:
Svein Berge/Torbjørn Brundtland (Röyksopp)

Lyricists of the Year:
Kjartan Kristiansen/Aslak Dørum (Dumdum Boys)

Metal:
The Cumshots

Open Class:
Kristin Asbjørnsen

Children’s music:
Malin Reitan

Producer of the Year:
Yngve Sæthre

Dance orchestra:
Vagabond

Jazz:
Tord Gustavsen Ensemble

Contemporary post-classical:
Oslo Filharmoniske orkester

Blues:
Reidar Larsen

Country:
Tore Andersen

Hip hop:
Tommy Tee

Folk Music/traditional dance music:
Olav Luksengård Mjelva

Classical:
Vilde Frang

Folk:
Tonje Unstad

Music Industry Award:
Barry Matheson

Contemporary post-classical composer of the Year:
Ruben S. Gjertsen

Full list of nominees here.

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Behold; Jazkamer — formerly known with an extra Z and M, also known to shed members and albums. Their trio format, consisting of founders John Hegre and Lasse Marhaug, with drummer Nils Are Drønen, visited Blå on Wednesday to celebrate one of their twelve new albums, The Monroe Doctrine.

Their 2008 album Art Breaker gave us 58 songs in 17 minutes. This year they give us 12 albums in 12 months. And this week they practically blew the blood through our veins, making neck hairs vibrate and eardrums pulsate. This is physical music that benifits from attention to detail. While Drønen might have started out with all that ‘I’ll just hit the drums like I can’t hear the band’-jazz going on, it turned out he was the real monster. The intensity, the stamina… There’s no reason why you wouldn’t want to catch one of the remaining nine release gigs this year.

Marhaug promised Dagsavisen every album this year will be a newly recorded studio effort, not a bunch of old live recordings and explained, “If the CD is a dying format we’re at least going to bid it a worthy farewell”.

Let’s just say if the live gig was a dying format, that too would go out with a bang this year.

Out now: Solitary Nail, Musica Non Grata and The Monroe Doctrine

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Casiokids’ 2006 full-length debut Fuck Midi played with all the elements that make the group such a compelling proposition today – creaky keyboards, a blend of indie-pop hooks and bubbling electro instrumentals, energy and low-key sincerity hand-in-hand – but, despite a surplus of ideas and enthusiasm, largely failed to coerce them into anything particularly striking. After that record the band vowed to stick to singles only, and spent the next few years honing their craft and periodically releasing a series of double A-side gems that were, almost without exception, utterly delightful. This follow-up album collects these eight singles and packages them with a second disc of remixes and covers. Which does mean that if you’ve been following Casiokids at all over the last few years chances are you will have heard most, if not all, of these songs before; even the remixes have been doing the rounds for some time. But by no means should its compilation status be allowed to devalue Topp Stemning as an album. The record is no less cohesive for not being the result of one session push, and if you have heard the bulk of the material before, well, it’s largely so good that there can be no real excuse for not listening to it quite a lot more.

The quality of the music on the first disc is superlative. “Grønt Lys i Alle Ledd” is a disarming indie pop charmer, “Togens Hule” squeezes ancient-sounding squeals and bleeps into a compulsive and sweet instrumental ride, and “Verdens Største Land” gives the impression of a more D.I.Y Cut Copy, with a driving beat, smooth bassline, chiming synths and falsetto harmonies. The two songs forming the centrepiece of the album are also Casiokids’ strongest to date: “Fot i Hose” and “Finn Bikkjen”. If you’ve heard one Casiokids track before, chances are it’s “Fot i Hose”, which has achieved quasi-ubiquity in the group’s native land and won a fair few fans abroad. And no wonder. Bouncing synth rolls over echoing bass to produce one of those musical instances where simplicity begets almost infuriating addictiveness.

Perhaps the band’s USP is their childishness – gigs (often specially for children) have included fruit, furry animals, shadow puppets and giant heads, the instrumentation has a playful naïvety, and the lyrics deal with seemingly simplistic and ‘immature’ themes and diction – but these youthful imaginings have a bittersweet edge. “Grønt Lys” lists simple pleasures, but the composite effect is a melancholic questioning of their validity, as if the band’s own light-hearted play breeds insecurities of its own. This restlessness recurs in “Finn Bikkjen”, the vocal high-point of the album, which marries wistful falsetto to a ripe synth beat. Ostensibly the song translates as ‘find the dog’, but the band have hinted at the title having its roots in a derogatory Bergen expression instead, where ‘bikkjen’ denotes something bad. Does the lamenting chorus then represent a hymn to negative experience and upheaval? No matter, a mournful synth wash and yearning vocals meander through a melody of the sweetest kind. It is the moment at which Casiokids’ recent tour pairing with Hot Chip seems most fitting.

The remainder of the first disc is similarly strong. “Gomurmamma” is another persuasive geriatric instrumental effort that quickly puts down roots, and closer “Min Siste Dag” is an intimate indie-pop singalong with a cute swinging refrain that recalls fellow Bergen natives John Olav Nilsen & Gjengen’s recent debut. If the disc has a weak point it would probably be “En Vill Hest”. There’s a cracking tune in there, but somehow this penultimate ditty, perhaps the band’s tribute to Paul Simon, ends up sounding a little off-key. Even then, though, there is enough in the afrobeat intrusions and curveball chorus-melody to more than entertain.

The ‘bonus’ disc almost holds its own with its partner, and it’s refreshing that the remixers are largely upstart locals – Captain Credible’s two efforts in particular are first-rate, his “Fot i Hose” managing to retain the character of the original whilst making it more dancefloor-friendly and also immediately recognisable as his own glitchy and hyperactive work, and Velferd (of Bergen newcomers The New Wine, and signed solo to Untz Untz) bathes “Verdens Største Land” in persuasive disco swathes to provide a worthy companion to the original. “Det Snurrer”, Casiokids’ own cover of Familjen’s Telle-released track from a few years back, is similarly successful. The remainder of the remixes, and an undemanding James Yuill ‘translation’, are solid if unspectacular, but by this point nothing could stop Topp Stemning from going down as a resounding triumph. Apparently the album title comes from a text from one of the bandmember’s mothers, telling him that there was a ‘great atmosphere in the local bar’. Stick this, the finest Norwegian record of the decade so far, on in the local and ‘topp stemning’ is guaranteed.

Casiokids just grew up bigtime.

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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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Here’s to March! The temperature is rising, snow is melting and sun shining, but we still have a load of fantastic photos from February’s highlight. They deserve to shine a bit longer.

Jaga Jazzist © Bård Bjerkestrand Sogge

Katzenjammer © Bård Bjerkestrand Sogge

Mathias Eick Quartet © Bård Bjerkestrand Sogge

Seabear (Iceland) © Bård Bjerkestrand Sogge

Social Suicide © Bård Bjerkestrand Sogge

The New Wine © Bård Bjerkestrand Sogge

CCTV © Bård Bjerkestrand Sogge

Ingrid Olava © Bård Bjerkestrand Sogge

Moddi © Bård Bjerkestrand Sogge

Serena Maneesh © Bård Bjerkestrand Sogge

Haddy N'jie © Bård Bjerkestrand Sogge

Nephew (Denmark) © Bård Bjerkestrand Sogge

Manhattan Skyline © Åse Bredeli Røyset

Bygdin © Fredrik Klingenberg

I See Horses © Fredrik Klingenberg

Jesse Jones © Fredrik Klingenberg

Donkeyboy © Fredrik Klingenberg

Donkeyboy © Fredrik Klingenberg

Kollwitz © Fredrik Klingenberg

Obliteration © Fredrik Klingenberg

Blood Command © Fredrik Klingenberg

A-laget © Fredrik Klingenberg

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MIC reports that Norway’s biggest international success, a-ha, is launching a funding programme to help export young Norwegian artists. This is their way of giving something back to the community that helped them reach the heights they did in the 80s, Magne Furuholmen explained during a press conference yesterday.

Furuholmen lead the by:Larm jury selecting one artist worthy of Statoil’s 800,000 NOK export fund. This year the funding landed in the lucky hands of Ingrid Olava, however during the process Furuholmen saw potential in many artists, and decided to take the matter into his own hands.

By the looks of it, there’s more money in high-pitched electro-pop than in oil; the a-ha fund totals at 4 million NOK, to be equally distributed between four promising artists or bands. The bands will also get the chance to support their funding fathers on one of four stadium shows in Norway this spring.

This is allegedly a-ha’s final tour, fittingly named “Ending on a High Note”, a tour that starts in Buenos Aires in April. In August/September the band will take on Bergen, Trondheim, Kristiansand, Stavanger and Tromsø, bringing a 20 semi trailer rig including a screen of almost 1000 square meters, playing to 14,000-16,000 people. Their very final shows, three dates in Oslo in December, sold out instantly, and tickets for the rest of the shows go on sale 8th March.

Further information on the funding and application process will be released12th April, and can be followed via aha2010.no.

Oh, and for those thinking “By God… Only in Norway.” Yes, you’re right. This is the third six-digit-or-more funding initiative to promote Norwegian artists abroad to be announced this month. First the traditional Statoil/by:Larm-fund, followed by Music Export Norway’s promise to give fund to two large export projects, and now this. We are spoiled.

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On Shining’s last record, Grindstone (2007), there was still a reasonable argument for labelling the group an experimental jazz band that just happened to dabble in occasional prog-metal intrusions. Not any more. Blackjazz crunches and screeches from beginning to end; every aspect of the record – the packaging, the song names, the semi-audibly barked vocals, and of course the music – adopts and adapts genre clichés and tries to simultaneously inhabit and reinterpret them. The cover art is angular and steely, the liner notes find what are presumably the lyrics printed in black on another shade of black. Good luck reading that. “Exit Sun”, “Fisheye”, “Omen” – the song titles hint at apocalypse, brutality, horror and destruction in contrast to previous albums’ allusive and bookish track designations, whilst the lyrics are totemic portents growled and howled through the bluster.

But to call these adoptions mere parodic affectation would be to do Blackjazz a crass injustice. Shining’s metallisation feels both natural and justifiable. The band have long been a tinnitus-inducing live prospect, and the highlight of Grindstone was the body-slamming opener “In The Kingdom of Kitsch You Will Be A Monster”, so to ‘go metal’ is an organic musical evolution that finds Shining playing to their strengths, and suggests a willingness to generally tighten up and give out a more coherent product. There is no time for fluttering flute solos, morse-code evocations of Bach, or nods to Milan Kundera. Where there are intertextual citations they are twisted to the dark side. “The Madness and The Damage Done” opens the record with a reverb-heavy shriek before pounding riffs tighten and swirl amidst addictive chanting and pained klaxon cries. As if to compound the notion of Blackjazz as an experiment in genre this flurry gives way to a repeated guitar shriek that thrashes and squeals in a seemingly endlessly held loop. Some bands might perform such a trick in a bid to show off intricate musicianship – and Shining certainly possess that in reams – but here the groove is stuck almost to the point of absurdity, the repetition becoming deconstruction.

There is a sense in which Blackjazz is a metal album for people who don’t like metal (or rather don’t like metal’s baggage). Its heaviness and atmosphere rendered acceptable by the musical journey the group have been on, their avant-garde background, and by the feeling that the metal touchstones are nothing more than a skin the group have chosen to slip into – the black adornments, howled vocals and evocations of destruction stemming not from any psychological bleakness or angst, but because they go hand-in-hand with the chosen musical direction. Shining are able to shape their musical output on a level that refuses to be influenced by convention or the genre hallmarks they so gleefully wink at. In the end Blackjazz manages to satisfy both followers of the group’s earlier acoustic jazz and staunch metalheads.

“Exit Sun” opens with chaotic percussion tumbling over a sharp heavy-metal riff that speeds into a frenzy before nailing breathless progressions to the shin of Muse’s ‘Hysteria’ bass line. All of this followed by guitar crunches and reverberating, mostly inaudible, vocals. If the sun does pack in then this should be odds-on to soundtrack the doom-mongering newsreels. Being Shining, though, this beast is followed by “Healter Skelter” which spills epileptic saxophone yelps over clattering drums and thrashing guitars. If the album closer, a black-metal cover of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” (another knowing evocation – Shining are oft compared to the prog experimentalists) is the most pertinent example of the album’s explanatory title, with wailing free-saxophone adorning prog guitars as Enslaved’s Grutle Kjellson growls black-metal vocals over the whole affair, there is plenty to suggest that influences come from other areas too. There is a recurring industrial edge to the guitars that hints at a more meaningful relationship with Nine Inch Nails than the similarities of the logo on the cover art. Album stand-out “Fisheye” opens with a barrage of screeching rave-metal guitars that make this perhaps the band’s most powerful track yet, whilst the vocals – sounding like a twisted call-and-response between a demonic killer and his hysterical victim, alternately barking or stuttering out a hypnotic and frightening cryptic verse – ensure you will come away both spooked and hooked.

Shining are built on contradictions, and the album title, whilst seemingly meshing two diverse genres, in fact confirms that the band’s strength lies in exploiting disparity. Grindstone broke off passages of extreme noise with airy trembling wind intrusions, but here there is far more ‘black’ than there is ‘jazz’. Whilst this feels continually intellectual and calculated, Shining’s project also comes across as wholly natural, the organic next stage of a band who have enough ideas, skill and power to mould a genre rife with wearying clichés into a shape both exhilarating and compulsive. ‘Same old, same old’, Munkeby can be heard snarling at one point, but ‘same old, same old’ Blackjazz defiantly is not.

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“Despite all attempt to save the USA/CANADA tour we are now forced to cancel it due to the financial situation. We are very sorry for all those who expected to see Mayhem live, we hope the situation will be better next time. We will work hard on getting back over there as soon as possible.”

You know all those preconceptions you harbour about black metal? Well, you have them because Mayhem did all that crazy shit. These days the group have been shorn of the more hardcore nutters by death and prison, but they will still doubtless bring impressive levels of scary noise to the sixteen dates of their recently confirmed US tour. Having added French guitarist Silmaeth to their line-up last year (incidentally their 25th anniversary - ‘25 Years of Chaos’, as they appropriately celebrated it), the band will be touring as a five-piece, with legendary Hungarian howler Attila Csihar back behind the mic.

Supported by Ludicra, Tombs and, on selected shows, Krallice, Mayhem will be causing health-and-safety regulated chaos in these digs across North America:

7 Apr: Washington, DC - 9:30 Club
8 Apr: New York, NY Fillmore - Irving Plaza
9 Apr: Cambridge, MA - Middle East Downstairs
10 Apr: Montreal, QC - Les Foufounes Electriques
11 Apr: Toronto, ON - The Opera House
13 Apr: Chicago, IL - Bottom Lounge
14 Apr: Minneapolis, MN - Triple Rock Social Club
15 Apr: Winnipeg, MB - Royal Albert Arms
16 Apr: Regina, SK - The Exchange
17 Apr: Edmonton, AB - Starlite Room
18 Apr: Calgary, AB - Republik
20 Apr: Vancouver, BC - The Commodore Ballroom
21 Apr: Seattle, WA - Studio Seven
22 Apr: Portland, OR - Hawthorne Theatre
24 Apr: San Francisco, CA - Slim’s
25 Apr: Los Angeles, CA - Henry Fonda Theater

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After a bowl of sweet potato soup and a couple of misunderstandings as to where we were supposed to meet, CCTV’s Shaun Curtis and Jon Martens finally walked into Q Diner and Bar at around six pm for a little chat about paranoia, dancing, by:larm and this year’s great Norwegian hype. Let’s have a convoluted round of applause for CCTV!

NM: So, what’s in a name, CCTV?

CCTV: Ha ha. We’re pretty sick of answering that question. We pretty much want people to read into it what they will. But, you know, it’s an abbreviation, and it has to do with surveillance, paranoia and what not. We are living in a society where you’re pretty much under constant surveillance and even if you don’t do the obvious things like go online or own a cell phone, you still leave traces. To stay anonymous, to maintain a certain degree of privacy, you have to move out in the forest or something. And then again, paranoia is an extremely private, very self-conscious emotion.

NM: Why do you belong here?

CCTV: I have been writing songs most of my adult life, but hadn’t had a band for a long time. Then, in 2008, after someone stole my eight track recorder and with it most of everything I had ever written, I started working on a Mac, a whole different approach that really opened up something for me. I got a band together and we performed a couple of times before it winded down again. Then, about six months after by:larm 2009 I got in touch with Jon here, and after one rehearsal we booked a gig at Garage and sort of just had to get going.

NM: You booked the gig without having a full band?

CCTV: Ha ha, yeah. See, I’m a pretty scatterbrained guy. I need to have strict routines so not to just leave everything to coincidence. Stuff tends to be left half done if I don’t have deadlines and such. So when the booking guy at Garage heard a couple of our songs and told us there would be a spot open for us when we got our shit together, I thought, fuck it, let’s just book a gig and get a band together asap. Two weeks later we were on stage, ha ha.

NM: Tell us a little bit about your inspiration, musically and otherwise.

CCTV: I don’t know. Hate. Love. Paranoia. Coffee, cigarettes, alcohol and dark staircases, ha ha. Oh, and, of course, women and anxiety. Anxiety and women. Anxiety about women. Those go together a bit, don’t they?

NM: If I say Manchester?

CCTV: Then we say bullshit! Or, well, you can’t really get away from The Smiths, Stone Roses, Joy Division, of course. But I get my inspiration as much from grunge and other American traditions, even if we melodically belong in the British pop tradition. I’d like to mention one band that no one else has, though it’s probably the band I’ve listened the most to, namely The La’s from Liverpool, who sadly had a rather, shall we say, strange man at the helm.

NM: Didn’t he go mad?

CCTV: You could say he got a bit carried away, ha ha!

NM: Four shows out of four hundred during this year’s by:larm means you represent exactly one percent of what’s going on in Oslo this week. Why should anyone take time out of his or her busy concert-going schedule to see you?

CCTV: One percent, that’s close enough, isn’t it? Well, we have our own sound, meaning we try to play electronic music, but not quite succeeding, ha ha, we have to play everything live since we don’t know how to sample. None of our shows are the same, we try to jam and go a little bit with the flow of things. And that’s something I enjoy myself when I see a show, that someone lets the moment carry them away, riff a little bit as they go along, you see? We’ve been told that we look like we mean what we do.

NM: And that’s important? Meaning what you do?

CCTV: Absolutely. The most boring thing I know is people who are just good at what they do. Zero soul, zero depth, just surface and technique. For me a little bit of soul gets you a long way.

NM: Pretty busy February, what’s the plan moving forward?

CCTV: March is probably going to be a rehearsal month for us, since we haven’t really practiced all that much, ha ha. We also want to start recording soon, and the plan is to have one single ready in April, and the album release date has been set in our minds to around November. But first and foremost we want to establish a live expression that we’re happy with. Everything we have to say about anything really, boils down to the dancing in front of the stage.

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