Author: Hugh Bohane

Swedish DIY garage-pop band ShitKid are the new Scandi kids on the block and, well, they aren’t shit. The English name of the band is a direct translation for Skitunge, which derives from a boogeyman folk tale passed down by parents so as to warn their kids off from playing in rock bands. Clearly, ShitKid were having none of that. Signed to Stockholm indie label PNKSLM Recordings, the band has released two formidable EPs one LP, and have a new full-length album on the way. Meanwhile, they have garnered the attention of magazines such as i-D, DIY and The Fader.

Our Hugh Bohane chatted with lead singer Åsa Söderqvist and the band’s music video director and fill-in keyboardist, Linda Hedström, as the group prepares to go on tour with The Melvins in October. Continue Reading →

Earlier this year drummer Laurence Pike (PVT, D.D Dumbo, Jack Ladder & The Dreamlanders and Szun Waves) released his first solo record, Distant Early Warning, which has been widely acclaimed by music critics, including a four-star review in The Guardian. When Hugh Bohane spoke with Laurence about the new release, he described his record as “a unique brand of improvised solo techno-spiritual jazz odysseys for drums and sampler.” Upon listening to the album he was indeed accurate in his cosmic description. Here is how their Skype interview went.

Congrats on the new solo release, Distant Early Warning. Can you tell us a bit about what the writing process was like making this record?

Laurence Pike: Thanks. It felt like the desire to do something much more personal and expressive in nature had been building for a while. I didn’t want to force it, so thought I’d wait until the right window appeared, and I felt ready mentally. 
I’d been messing around with these loose thematic ideas which essentially are built around the concrete sounds I’ve created and amassed on my sampler, and was then applying them in performances as a launch pad, using the acoustic drums to improvise around the electronics in different ways as I triggered them live, framing them and gluing them together. I felt like a process that had endless potential, and still does.

I enjoy the ritual and discipline of creating the work. It’s so amorphous in nature — it really relies on me examining the different possibilities of reinterpreting the same grouping of pieces of a puzzle, and feeling confident in my ability to perform in a free and expressive way, to create something in the moment; a combination of decisions that could never be arrived at if I were to approach it from an electronic production perspective for example. In the end I realized I had kind of been putting off making a solo album for a long time because I was too conscious of production decisions, or the time being right, or having control over the process, etc. Once I acknowledged that the music was inherently performance based, and that the very human aspect of it is what makes it interesting, I booked the studio and made it in a single day. The music was already there, I just had to take it to the dance. Continue Reading →