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  • Aquatint

    FYN99

    Artist: Testbild!

    Label: Friendly Noise

    “Aquatint”, the most ambitious Testbild! project to date, is a conceptual piece coloured by the sea. The music is a dream-like descent into steam fog and black swirls. Layers of cinematic pop and 60’s jazz mix with sea shanties, Mexican trumpets and vibraphones. It is the echoes from a forgotten harbour, where the ropes never stopped creaking and the meteorograph went on ticking.

    The release, which is the fifth Testbild! album since 2002, includes 20 songs in 68 minutes, including the recent mp3 single “My brother submariner” / “Garnet brand land”. Written and performed by Stepbrother Ernest, Jana T. Mekka, Nathaniel Mist, Goliath Quadslums, Furian Siber and Dustin Spunkvolt, except “My brother the submariner, written by Matt Jones of The Hepburns.

    Link to Aquatint short film by Pontus Lundkvist: http://vimeo.com/2567610

  • My Brother the Submariner/Garnet Brand Land

    FYN512

    Artist: Testbild!

    Label: Friendly Noise

    Two tracks from the forthcoming album by Testbild!. It's entitled Aquatint and will be released by Friendly Noise. Following last year's Une teinte intense, an album light as a mirage, that bridges pop, jazz and exotica in the sun-bleached deserts of North Africa, Aquatint is, instead, an outburst of underwater inspiration.

    "My Brother the Submariner" is originally a song by The Hepburns that finds its message explored further by Testbild!. "Garnet Brand Land" is set somewhere over the waves yet under the stars. Possibly near the coast of Mexico, by the sound of it.

    Swedish magazine Digfi said: "Who could possibly resist music as exquisite as this?"

  • Une Teinte Intense

    FYN52

    Artist: Testbild!

    Label: Friendly Noise

    “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.

  • Imagine A House

    FYN33

    Artist: Testbild!

    Label: Friendly Noise

    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.



  • The Inexplicable Feeling of September

    FYN22

    Artist: Testbild!

    Label: Friendly Noise

    Testbild! is a secretive project from Malmö, Sweden playing popmusic with avantgarde pretentions. On “The Inexplicable Feeling Of September” they mix surreal guitarpop with dreamlike constructions of recorded everyday sounds, the smell of moss and damp leaves of Autumn and visions of the honey yellow shade in the atmosphere that only a sunset in September can bring about.

    Rain heavy cloud formations hanging over the ramshackle house where the recordings took place; the sound of fragmented melodies and choral arrangements is oozing out from the cracked windows and sinking like a sarcophag in the mould. Somewhere a child is crying. If it was possible to “dream” a pop record it would have sounded like this, peculiar melodies and quirky chords performed by four shadowy figures.