Track By Track: Telephones – Vibe Telemetry
Norway's fresh faced prince of cosmic feel good has just released his debut album on Gerd Janson's Running Back record label. Henning has come a long way from the early days in which he released on the likes of Full Pupp and The Very Polish Cut Outs. His development has helped to demonstrate the ongoing significance of Norway's culture on the rest of electronic music. When we spoke with Henning several months ago he explained that the album had been built in a reflective manner, it was to be his attempt at recreating the sound and emotion of his youth which he first discovered in the disco clubs of Bergen during the nineties. As a result the variety and discourse throughout the record remains strong and focused, maintaining much of the "uplifiting" charm which has helped define is sound, musical persona and general outlook towards life. One of the good guys, Henning takes us through the release below…
147 STARS
Colour: Dream-colours. Feels like yellow, looking like something else. Dark blue almost black, or purple, but with the full spectrum twinkling discretely in tiny static spots if you look closely. Radiating, but dim. Stars, clusters and galaxies on a BASF VHS-tape.
Season: A warm scandinavian summer night, or a chill equatorial morning before sunrise. A season without gravity. But it's night time. Or maybe day time in space.
Inspiration: Hubble, stars, cosmic dust and how I imagine carbonated water behaving in space, the opening scene of Blade Runner and Paul Atreides dreams in Dune.
Setting: Created from a memorized feeling of floating in swimmingpools at night looking up, specifically one in Ibiza and one in Saigon, 2015. Similar situations would be suited for listening, although night or sunrise anywhere would do fine as well.
SIERRA:
Colour: Green, grey, brown, red and crisp blue. Fresh earth colours and sky. The colour of wind.
Season: Autumn in a hot place. So, technically summer for us europeans..
Inspiration: Fog, pine trees, mountains, vast (with David Attenborough-voice) horizons and aerobatics.
Ideal setting: Open-air dancefloors or driving a car in places with a cool view.
TRIPPING BEAUTY:
Colour: Green with a transparent and watery touch, joined by hints of wood, perhaps oak, but I think it's pine.
Season: Monsuun. Or simply a normal rainy, though incredibly fresh, evening in the natural surroundings of Bergen or Sotra (the seasons there are confusingly similar).
Inspiration: Started as an alternative take, or spin-off, from the remix I did for Vangelis Katsoulis, it then spaced-out and grew into something of it's own.
Setting: An overgrown forest where cables, trees, old modems, vegetation, computers and organic matter merge. Dancing in the rain.
DATAJUNGEL:
Colour: A multicolored affair, though mainly through green notes again, with hints of yellow, bright lights and twinkly pastels in a dim way. There might be some dark purple in there as well.
Season: Beginning of life. Spring.
Inspiration: Again, jungles and computers, but also playing around with Hawaii-records (which I collect) through effects and processing. Originally this was intended as the second track of the album, where "147 Stars" would start in the middle of a cosmic vacuum, then this, jumping from macrocosmos to microcosmos where all sorts of life emerge. Combining sampled and recorded nature-sounds with artificially created similar sounds, building a soundscape where the artificial and organic is indistinguishable, yet noticeable. After all, we are all just really fancy, complicated and independent (seemingly) organic robots..
Setting: Anywhere with nice nature surroundings.
HIGHS AND BUNGALOWS:
An interlude from the above.. taking you gradually more into 128kbps US Robotics BBS Modem-land and beyond the grid.
SEA, HEX & MOON:
Colour: Moonlight, deep blue tones, flashes of bright colours surfacing from below, breaking a silvery water crust.
Season: Summer, although it could also be winter with tons of cottonish snow. But in my head it`s summer.
Inspiration: Late 90s in Klokkarvik outside Bergen where I grew up for the most part, staying up at night before school-days programming music on Fasttracker2, trying to make something similar to what I heard in (or outside) clubs, or played on DJ Strangefruit's radioshow. The sound of seagulls outside my window following a fishboat, the low frequency drones of bigger boats passing by and the pounding distant beat of the local ferry leaving the docks, heading for the islands.
Setting: By, in or at sea.
Klokkarvik – Norway
MEZCAL ECLIPSE:
Colour: Neverending shades of purple, increasingly more vibrant and textured as your eyes adjust to the darkness. A rainbow at night, or what looks like night. Suddenly it's daytime.
Season: Hurricane season, though feeling like summer.
Inspiration and setting: I had this abstract idea of some sort of balearic techno, executed in an afro-disco way with rave-pianos and galloping percussion.. an imagined time-machine bastardized dancefloor of parallel universes, putting you in a Belgian basement in Detroit, or a suburban UK warehouse, a backyard party in Ghana, and splashing into a Norwegian fjord simoultaneously.
EXPANSE:
Colour: Technicolour.
Time of day: Morning.
Inspiration/setting: Day-break, a place in between. Something opening up.
ENTROPIKÁLIA:
Smell: Lime, photosynthesis, ocean and coconuts.
Season: September.
Inspiration: This track has a lot of elements from different places dating waaaay back, but I know I wanted to make something bubbly and tribal. Something boiling.. Some of the toms (of which there are many) are from a 909 programmed with a heavy swing and then non-swinged tape delay. I wanted the drums to sound alive and merge the organic and computerized. It's then paired with me playing an african talking-drum in a technique I imagine is best described as utterly wrong.
African Talking Drum
UNTITLED (THE PARTY)
Material: Rubber, concrete and salt (sea or sweat, depending).
Setting: A warehouse-party in a bunker by the sea.
Inspiration: Initially one of many versions of "Untitled" from which "The Island" version ended up on The Ocean Called EP. Then re-worked and molded for this album. In my head this is the Mad Mike/UR tribute-track on the album, allthough that might not be obvious to everyone.
FLOW SYSTEM
Colour: Dark blue, transparent black (or simply a lack of light, so what colours are there are left to ones own imagination) with yellow and green undertones. I think.
Smell: Dewy vegetation, leather/drum skins, concrete and basil. Maybe even a touch of limegrass. No idea why.
Inspiration: Late 90s early 00s Norwegian club music. An imaginary valium-version of CJ Bolland in 90s Italy. This track also has a lot of elements dating back all over the calendar.. In the end it was specifically tailored to bridge a gap, and for me, lay the foundation for the last track on the album.
DTMF
Colour: Full spectrum.
Season: Teenage summer-holiday.
Inspiration: Touch-tone keypad landline phones, numbers on a napkin, distant ringing, nostalgic romance, vodka, Pineapples, trees and Italo Disco. If you play back a phones dial-tone to itself it stops ringing. Reaching a destination.
Setting: The end. Or a new beginning.
Buy the release HERE.
