Koop
Sons Of Koop
Superstudio Blå

Imagine yourself in a picture. You're in a forest. It has just stopped raining. A few rays of sunshine dance on a bog in the forest. It looks like fairies dancing to greet the warming light. A thin fog is lying like milk between the trees and it is cold and totally still. You hear music. It is the sound of Koop and it is the perfect soundtrack to a picture like this.

But Koop is more than just the soundtrack of a forest-dream. The gentlemen behind the album and the name - Oscar Simonsson and Magnus Zingmark, built their studio in a cabbin on a small island far from the city. But every weekend they went into town to go to clubs and this too is reflected in the music. The result is a strange mixture of urban and rural sounds.

None of the songs can really be called "club-song", though. In stead it is a nice blend of jazz and ambient techno that I have never heard before, even though names such as Tricky and Massive Attacks later work comes to mind (but they lack the unmistakeable sound of scandinavian nature and climate - cold, dark and desolate).

One of the songs is called Bjarne Riis and it is named after the danish cyclist that won the Tour de France race last year. According to the Koop-team the song is arranged as a race and the listener follows Bjarne on his struggle through the French mountains.

It is very typical for Koop to have this kind of idea behind each song, where the sound creates an impression or an image. Another example is the 8th track, Jellyfishes which is about the tragical Estonia accident in which more than 1000 people drowned in the Baltic Sea.

Koop is in a way very Scandinavian. The music is melancholic and slow, dark and cold, silent and lonely, yet beautiful and emotional. I guess that listening to this record sitting in an apartment in, for example, Los Angeles or on a beach on Hawaii would be a weird experience. Almost like snow in June or like seeing a reindeer in Africa, if you see what I mean.

Copyright © 1997 Erik Starck