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FYN 69 / ACTION BIKER _ HESPERIAN PUISTO (2008)
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.
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 Barett, The Passions, St Christopher, John Barry, Can, Human League, Colleen, Marine Girls, Eric Dolphy, Telex, George Delerue, The Wake, Kraftwerk, Lori & The Chameleons, Differnet.
Liner notes for “Hesperian Puisto”:
With a voice like Spring, and always dancing. So far, the myths that flourish about Action Biker all agree. But pinning her down has proved difficult. Contradictory accounts associate her with the North and the West respectively, giving rise to strange conjectures. Following sightings of Sarah walking through Hesperian Puisto, she has been connected with the Hesperides, those guardians of a tree of golden apples in a grove at the western border of the Ocean. These were renowned for their sweet singing. Rumoured the daughters of Night, they inherited her influence over creation. According to another theory, they were sisters with Calypso, making the Evening Star their grandfather.
A link can also be traced to a race of Apollo-worshippers in the far north, in short: fans of sun, music, and poetry residing somewhere past the North Wind. Legends resounding with the beat of drums tell us of their questionable ways to happiness, while certain documents, now lost to us, mention much simpler causes for rejoicing (late night kitchen dancing, shopping ingredients for peach pie and so on).
However, the dominant impression left by Action Biker has to do with the artistic refinement of her mind; her intense ability to dream; her gift for hearing music where others would not. The image is one of fearlessness, of unending playfulness.
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The Dreamers are an Anglo/Swedish duo featuring Sarah Nyberg Pergament and Kevin Wright. Sarah has previously recorded as Action Biker and Kevin as Always and Mr Wright (recordings from the last 20 years on labels such as él, Le Grand Magistery and Siesta). Meeting at a Swedish music festival in 2004 the pair began by writing the song “Petit Nuage” in late 2005. Encouraged by this an album began taking shape being recorded mostly in London with Sarah’s vocals being sent from Stockholm and Helsinki. The Dreamers’ influences combine many disparate elements including jazz pop and soundtrack music. Although the music is often melancholic the Dreamers hope to make (to paraphrase Michel Legrand speaking of Tom Jobim) “the sad music that makes the world a better place.”
Influences: Stan Tracey, Caetano Veloso, Colleen, Francoise Hardy, Kryzystof Komeda, Matching Mole, Anna Karina, Bill Evans, Monica Zetterlund, Nara Leao, Bernard Herrmann, Nico…
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“Une teinte intense” is a beautiful tribute to one of Testbild!s greatest heroes, Isabelle Eberhardt. Excerpts from authentic diary entries and stories from Eberhardt’s travels are embedded in a dreamy sound environment in which bedouin drums and muezzin voices can be heard and where warm winds blow in the distance. The songs and pop melodies that also form the album flow like spring water in the irrigation canals. Smoke comes sweeping from the Moorish café and blue tones sparkle in the desert sand. Through the insufferable heat, the contours of an ivory white city, a mysterious oasis among the dunes, appears. Only to disappear…
Isabelle Eberhardt (born in 1877 in Geneva) was an explorer and reporter of Russian aristocratic background. She was raised as an anarchist, converted to Islam in her early twenties and set off for a long journey through the North African desert, under a male identity. She reported from her travels and covered wars in French papers, and wrote several short stories and diaries. Eberhardt was also selected to join the mystical Muslim brotherhood of Qadriyya. As a man she called herself Si Mahmoud Essadi and her anarchistic integrity and her view on love affairs and drugs made French and Swiss authorities consider her a dangerous person. In 1904, she drowned when the clay house she had rented in Aïn Sefra, Algeria, was destroyed by a flooding river.
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An apparatus with a sad objective
The average density of this music is enough to stop its expansion so that it begins contracting. Although the end result is unknown, this scenario may allow the beginning to have been immediately preceded by the end of preceding performances: countless swarming bees preceding a sudden urge in the midst of the swarm to bring forth cityscapes and parklands, or a story of love delayed from the viewpoint of exactly that same city in respect to another galaxy. Another idea could be to allow the music of someone else carefully unfold inside the milieu already established. Would that be enough to stop the music from expanding? Probably not.
But if instead a song tells us about the future and then presents us with precisely this same vision? That, for sure, would make the apparatus fold in on itself. We may even venture to prevent this fatal dilution by means of a quaquaversal, totalizing insurance, allowing us to manipulate secondary energy sources through the increasing efficacy of information processing. Perhaps not. Perhaps still. If we could just imagine all the things to come as anticipations of the past, as the average density of this music.
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Do you recall that rust-coloured old brick house on the abandoned site that lay next to the playground when you were a child? That neglected shack with broken windows and cracked doors, that you were strictly forbidden from playing in (but naturally did anyway)? That very house is where the new album by Testbild! was recorded. The four dream characters that make up the band have taken advantage of all the sonic singularities of the house, and adorned their surrealist pop music with humming radiators, squeaking hinges and creaking floorboards. If you keep really quiet you can hear the owls breathing in the attic and the family of bats scratching away on the walls.
This is a summer album. But it’s a summer influenced by the pictures of Edward Gorey, a summer confusing dusk with dawn. It’s music that sparkles like sun reflections on the water of ghost town canals, it’s tones from a shadow world in decay, melodies like frozen moments from a time that just maybe exists still.
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