FRIENDLY NOISE

is a Swedish collective dedicated to the intersection of experimentation and pop. The collective has roots in the Benno, Twisterella, and Gospel zines. Prior to the label's founding, the Friendly Noise folks referred Testbild! to Radio Khartoum, and it's only fitting that Testbild! have since released quite a few albums in their native Sweden on Friendly Noise.

Distribution in North America (and, to some extent, beyond) for Friendly Noise releases is coordinated by Radio Khartoum.

It really is time for Action Biker’s first solo album! It has now been six years since she emerged as an artist doing fun and popular live shows and releasing CD-R’s in the indie pop scene of Gothenburg, Sweden, which included people like Jens Lekman and The Honeydrips. Since then, Sarah Nyberg Pergament has been involved in other projects, such as Flow Flux Clan, Kissing Mirrors and The Dreamers, whose record “Day For Night” has received great acclaim from different places around the world. Over the years, Sarah has also performed lots of Action Biker shows (some, as an opening act for Le Tigre and The Embassy), contributed to recordings with Lars Blek (The Field), Differnet and The Honeydrips, and all this time, new recordings with Action Biker have popped up on compilations and singles.

In brief, when “Hesperian Puisto” finally is released, it means the début of someone with a lot of experience… The record is named after the Hesperian park in Helsinki, Finland, where Sarah lived for a while. She describes her music as baroque on synthesizers. It is pop music built on complex naivety – altogether very accessible music with distinct vocals and a crispy, sweet, analogue sound. Two great-looking videos are also included on the CD.

References and Influences: Young Marble Giants, Broadcast, Dislocation Dance, Moondog, Virna Lindt, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Antena, Francoise Hardy, Saint Etienne, Brian Eno, Ghost Box, Stereolab, Fred Astaire, Maurice Ravel, ESG, Komeda, Cluster, Flying Lizards, Syd Barrett, The Passions, St Christopher, John Barry, Can, Human League, Colleen, Marine Girls, Eric Dolphy, Telex, George Delerue, The Wake, Kraftwerk, Lori & The Chameleons, Differnet.

Stellar, crunchy melodics from perennial Friendly Noise favorites Differnet. Icy, beautiful, and kind of in-your-face at the same time.

The elusive second album by Differnet, available again.

Here is a round-up of the tracks included, with some leading bits of (dis)information: A FABLE: As title suggests, and in a galaxy far away. EDISON: A song in several parts. Stylus ultimately picking up, the pick-up event adventure. SAURAU: Austrian misanthropy to a disco beat. ON A TRAIL: Johan Duncanson of The Radio Dept. singing wrong of love gone wrong. SEARCHING FOR MR RIGHT: Young Marble Giants were a great band. No further explanation needed. CALIGULA: Featuring a very wicked boychild. Drone-style. CRASH RECONSTRUCTION: Built around a track from, and featuring, Swedish band CDOASS. Electro in the middle. ALBUQUERQUE: Like a children’s rhyme, but distorted. Sometimes. Vocals by Sarah Nyberg Pergament, a.k.a. Action Biker. KERNEL PANIC: A sort of operating systems funk. Something beautiful could happen. ANALPHABETISM: The sound of an old harmonium, an alpha, a beta - let it be all you need. MAGNETIC MEMORIES: Can’t get you out of my head.

A lovely suite of nocturnal pop from Kevin Wright (Mr. Wright, Always) and Sarah Nyberg Pergament (Action Biker). I love where Sarah’s collaboration has taken Kevin’s music...bridging the gap between those lovely, homesick pieces that turned up on Always’ Thames Valley LP ... and Differnet. “All Across the City” is simply one of the loveliest tunes I’ve heard all year.

Debut album from Swedish quartet MOST VALUABLE PLAYERS throws open the blinds and lets the light shine in. The four fellows from Nacka cite “new instruments and new technology” among their influences, and the album is an appropriately bright world of discovery, exploration, loops, electronics, harmonizing vocals, beauty in frailty, beautiful keyboard melodies and child-like wonder. Press “play” again and listen to “A Dream (Dreamt)” being shaped in the knowledge that “Music Breaks Where No Sun Shines.” Other influences: Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, Italo Calvino, Olivia Tremor Control, Robert Wyatt, New Order, Active Suspension...

“Best swedish record so far this year, best record art ever !” - Jens Lekman

Now this is a proper long player! I say this not merely because the music itself clocks in at 68 minutes, but because it is a record to immerse oneself in. The music is warm, comforting, and yet somewhat disorienting. The program is at its strongest taken whole; in fact, I’m very doubtful that the excepts below do justice to the album. I’m confident, however, that if you already like Testbild!, this album will make you like them even more. (For newcomers to Testbild!, perhaps Imagine a House or The Double Life of Testbild! are better entry points…I’m not sure.) In addition to the 20 songs, this album also includes a 12-page booklet comprising a short story, a short film by collective member Pontus Lundkvist (honestly, I have no idea if Pontus also plays music), and a 6-panel digipak with the most beautiful blue I’ve ever seen on a CD cover (and neck and neck with the blue on Lill Lindfors’ 1967 debut LP). Hooray for the printed artifact!

A very pleasant left turn finds the Testbild! collective not in outer space or ocean depths, but in the Sahara circa 1900. Une teinte intense is a tribute to explorer Isabelle Eberhardt. Excerpts from her travel diaries float in a dreamy sound environment of Bedouin drums, echoing muezzin calls, and warm winds blowing in the distance, while pop melodies flow like spring water in the irrigation canals. Light as a mirage, this album bridges pop, jazz and exotica in the sun-bleached deserts of North Africa.

Utterly lovely new album from Testbild!, now a quartet, with Petter and Mattias joined by Douglas Holmquist (Dr Higgins, Rodriguez) and film maker Pontus Lundkvist. Lacking most of the jagged postpunk edges of the second album or their recent 7" split with Anthony Rochester, the new Testbild! make good with gentle melodies and layers and layers of tasty keyboard, metallophone, lullaby vocals and atmospherics recorded in that house--you know, the one at the end of the street that you were forbidden to play in (but did, nevertheless). The band purport to be influenced by acid folk and Canterbury pop songs, but I think it’s just sweet, moody and really good. Tasty artwork too, plus a 14 minute film* by Pontus, in a digipak with lyric book.

*The RK mac had trouble playing the .avi file till I downloaded the free VLC Media Player. The film is pretty freaky, by the way—definitely more Eraserhead than Jacques Tati—and not exactly my cuppa, but the music is fabulous.

RK artist Testbild! returns, this time by way of friendly label Friendly Noise (it was one of the label’s bosses who originally referred Testbild! to RK back before FN was up and running). Another solid dollop of lilting pop melodies, jagged postpunk bits, and beautiful autumn melancholia. There’s a new emphasis on choral arrangements this time around, and the album has an earthy feel as well. Very atmospheric at points...you’ll drift, and just might experience some inexplicable feelings.

A collection of exclusive tracks from the Radio Dept., Testbild!, Most Valuable Players, Differnet, Action Biker, Viktor Sjöberg, VED, Peter Jackson, Peter Nilsson, Redmalm, Enheten för musik och melodi, Malkovic, Erik de Vahl, Band in a Box, Flow Flux Clan, Robotboy, and Jian.

Between January and December 2007 Friendly Noise released 18 mp3 singles offered as free downloads from the label’s website. From the start it was intended to be a one-year-long project. The idea was simple: contributions chosen by us from our extended family of old friends and new discoveries, usually two songs, together with an introduction by the artists themselves and a picture to illustrate and enhance, once or twice a month. This was meant as a complement to our CD releases, and a chance to easily distribute great songs, in cases where the album context isn’t necessary. These two ways of distribution aren’t contradictory, they’re related, as we stated on our website.

Soon we realized the series had become a success, both when it came to the quality of the output and the amount of interest generated. So “Splendid Isolation” — our third compilation after “Friendly People Making Noise” (2003) and “Are You Scared To Get Happy?” (2006) — is our way of documenting the series through a selection of the songs and thus giving them a more official kind of release. The record is also a celebration of five years of Friendly Noise as a label. The order of the songs on the record isn’t chronological, it’s instead our attempt to make the record sound as good as possible as a whole.

Their hearts hide dreams of perfect piano intros. Their hands strum plastic harps while aiming the sound at the distant sky. They’re dreamers fighting to lift their heads high, even though they’re weighed down from romantic reverie and broken illusions. “Are You Scared To Get Happy?” is the soundtrack from a play which ran from 22 August 2003 to 14 June 2006. It is also the second installment in a trilogy of compilations from Stockholm’s Friendly Noise label. The latest and the freshest of the Swedish scene, including exclusive songs from The Radio Dept., Differnet, Testbild!, The Field, Auton, Friday Bridge, Flow Flux Clan, Sarto, Erik de Vahl, Conduo Orchestra, Lars Blek, Most Valuable Players, Dianas Tempel, Kuryakin, Discolor, Majessic Dreams, Action Biker, Stream and Nicolas Makelberge. The musical scope is wide but cohesive, it’s dancy electronic music, straight ahead indiepop songs, dreamy instrumental beauties, distortion, jazz pop, and so on! Includes six covers (songs by Cola Boy, The Embassy, The Cure, Electric Prunes, Young Marble Giants and Prefab Sprout).