Daily Discovery: Gidge is Making Music As Beautiful as Their Swedish Surroundings

None

Daily Discovery is a feature that will highlight a new or recently discovered artist that we’re excited about. See the rest of our Daily Discoveries here.


Did you have the pleasure of getting lost in the immersive world of misty forests and and pale sunrises that Gidge created on “Norrland,” the last song they shared from their upcoming album Autumn Bells? If not, you missed out on something pretty special, an almost perfectly put together song that mixed dance music with a truly organic feel that seems to reflect the beautiful landscape surrounding the small town of Umeå, where the duo are originally from.

Gidge’s Autumn Bells album, out September 23, is excellent throughout. Each and every track creates its own sense of atmosphere and emotion, whether that’s the nostalgia of “I Fell In Love” (one of my favorite songs of the year) or the epic “Growth,” which we’re happy to premiere below. The track unfurls slowly, growing from unassuming beginnings towards the powerful peaks of disembodied vocal samples and clanking percussion—don’t be put off by its length, just hit play and float away with Gidge for a while.

Pre-order Autumn Bells here, and read an interview with the duo below.


How did the two of you meet and how long have you been making music together?

We met in school, when we were 16. Quite quickly we realized that we had the same taste in electronic music, and we started making music one year later. So we’ve been producing together for 9 years now.

Do you always work in the studio together or is it more about sending parts back and forth to each other?

From the very start we’ve worked mostly separately. Usually, one of us has an idea and makes the foundation for a song before showing it to the other. Then we sit down and listen to it together and talk about what needs to be improved or what parts need changing and so on. Then, after working on it some more, we switch projects with each other. It’s usually in the final stages of the production that we actually sit down and work together on a song.

You guys are from Umeå, Sweden. What is the town like and what is the music scene like there? How has the area affected your music?

It’s a small town, which used to really annoy us. We never felt at ease here, we travelled a lot and as soon as we came back we just wanted to leave again. But after living in Paris for nearly a year, which in itself was fantastic, we came back and saw Umeå in a new light. There’s something beautiful about living in a town so small that you can’t go to your favorite café without bumping into your friends.

Umeå is full of intelligent, creative and talented people. It’s has never really affected our music though, there’s no real electronic music scene here. The woods surrounding Umeå is probably the one thing that has influenced our music the most. We are lucky to be living near such stunning and easily accessible nature, where we can always go for inspiration.

How would you ideally want people to experience your Autumn Bells album?

We always wanted to create an album that you can actually feel when you listen to it. If we can manage to temporarily transport the listener to some distant place in their mind, then we’ve succeeded. In a more practical sense, the ideal way to experience Autumn Bells is probably on a train going through northern Sweden.

There are dance music influences in your music, and then organic elements—what artists are influences on your sound and what artists have impacted you the most?

We rarely listen to music thinking “this is great, let’s do this.” We’re inspired by lots of artists, from many different genres, but the best inspiration is that which makes you want to do your own thing. It doesn’t even have to be music. You can look at a painting in a museum, and suddenly it just hits you like thunder, and all you want is to go home and produce.

Have you got plans to bring your music to audiences? If so, would that be as DJs or would you like to recreate the songs live with hardware?

The way we make our music just wouldn’t be possible to completely recreate live, but what we want to do is to find a good balance between pre-produced and live, where we play some things live, and have some things made in advance. Some electronic producers have this idea that they want to perform with a full band, and that usually just ruins it, but we think a certain amount of live elements can benefit the performance as a whole, and that’s what we’re aiming for.


latest_stories_pigeons-and-planes