Interview: Naboklage "Brått" EP

What inspired you creatively to make this EP?

It’s the same as always: those magic moments of bliss on the dancefloor where the music, atmosphere and people give me goosebumps. I aim to reproduce the same feeling with my music, often ending up completely different than the song that initially inspired the track, being a continuation or evolution of the feeling and idea the way I remember it. 

For this EP specifically, the moments of inspiration were all in Oslo with all the awesome people that are shaping the new scene of forest raves and techno club nights. Particularly the forest raves, with its complete disregard of the concept “genre” inspired the diverse styles found in the EP.

How is your work flow, how do you make music?

It always starts with an idea of a vibe or wanting to capture a certain feeling. Honestly it's a race against the clock trying to put the sounds in my head into my DAW before it disappears. I wish there was a faster way to interface sounds in my head to actual audio in the DAW, that would make my life so much easier, as I often have elaborate sound design heavy ideas where my brain invents sounds that I have no idea how to make. It involves a lot of trial and error and is quite chaotic, which sometimes leads to happy accidents, or me being super frustrated that I can’t make what I had envisioned. 

Occasionally I do hardware jams to get ideas started, but that rarely leads to anything other than me having fun for hours and never remembering to record it.

What is your dream synthesizer?

Probably some extremely over the top modular system. However that would completely kill my creative process as I have to be able to work fast and have the ability to produce the sounds in my head predictably and fast, which patching a bunch of modules together is the complete opposite of. Synths that do one thing really well is more useful to me in that regard, as I know what part of the puzzle it can reliably fill. 

I guess the more correct answer is a synth that has a UI that’s so perfect that I can make the exact sound I have in my head in like 5 seconds, no matter how complex the sound is. Maybe someone will make a chip one day that I can insert into my brain stem and interface directly with a computer, literally recording the sounds in my head. I could be a techno cyborg.

You are known for your high BPM music and call yourself a jump connoisseur. Where do you get this energy from? 

I think this is mostly my style of DJing, where my production are more diverse in terms of energy. When I go out to dance, I want to dance my ass off to the point where there’s a river of sweat running down my whole body. I also want to be challenged, surprised and inspired by weirdness. So I try to make my sets like that. Also when the crowd mirrors my energy I get hyped, which hypes them up, and then there’s this feedback loop of hype that goes crazy.

Also, I think there’s a misconception about what makes a good high energy set. It’s all in the tension and release, the peaks and the valleys. You can’t go 4/4 at 160 BPM for an hour straight. I guess my main strength as a DJ is the ability to keep the tension and energy of the high energy stompers throughout sections of my set with a lot of variation and arguably even low energy tracks. 

As for the jumping, there’s not really time to do anything between the beats when the BPM is too high. I think I need to work on my dance move repertoire. 

You play live, on vinyl and CDJ. Which format do you enjoy the most right now?

I really like the creative control of playing live, but it requires so much preparation and there’s so many things that could go wrong and kill the vibe.

As DJing with CDJs is so ridiculously easy technically, I get to focus more on track selection, phrasing and jumping, allowing a more playful and loose style. 

I don’t really know why I decided to start DJing vinyl. It’s very expensive, very inconvenient and requires constant attention and adjustment for my style of long, almost mashup-like transitions. However, crate digging vinyl and having a physical copy of a recording of something from the past that’s not available anywhere feels a lot better than just a another .mp3 file in my enormous digital collection. My vinyl collection is way weirder and feels more personal than my digital collection, so it makes for a different kind of set.

To summarize they all fill a separate role, and I love doing a combination of all 3 depending on the gig.

All of your tracks are named different Norwegian words. Can you tell us what they mean and why you chose these exact words for the tracks?

I guess I can start out generally by saying that since this EP was inspired mainly by the scene in Oslo over the last year, I wanted the track names to be Norwegian words, some specific to slang in the greater Oslo area.

SURT - It means sour, or acidic. It’s 4 different acid bassline melodies playing with each other throughout the track on top of some breakbeats.

TÅKE - It means fog. The track just really gives off the vibe of something blurry and foggy going in and out of your focus. 

SKJÆRT - This one started out as “brukken” (broken), as the beat is broken. Then as I kept making new versions of it as I never seemed to be happy with it, I changed the name to another synonym for broken. “Skjært” is a common phrase I say a lot, directly translating to “cut” or “sliced”, meaning something is broken or not in optimal condition. 

BRÅTT - This is a word I say a lot. It means “sudden”, and is commonly used as a replacement for the phrase “Yes that might happen suddenly”. This EP happened suddenly, and this track suddenly appeared out of some material I had used for a hardware live set, which I suddenly prepared with short notice. It’s mostly thanks to Andreas at Flux who enthusiastically calls me randomly asking if I can put together a liveset, EP, remix or other things on very short notice. I love high intensity and high tempo in my life, his sudden requests, encouragement and belief in me made me get shit done like never before. Shoutout Andreas and his time optimism. 

FEBERDRØM - The name translates to fever dream. Basically I had a deadline for the EP mid January, and caught COVID on New Years Eve, so I made a lot of music during quarantine. This track was made while spacing out completely with a fever, starting off as a jam on my DFAM where I was experimenting with silly kick drums and some trippy acid line (which didn’t make it in the end). Being spaced out with a fever caused me to be way less critical and I ended up doing a lot of super silly and weird things that I probably wouldn’t dare to consider normally. I hope I’ll manage to do that more in the future without catching covid first.