![]() "This old drunk guy was pestering me and a friend in the pub," Torske recalls. The percussion-based floor-filler that is Torske's Jeg Vil Være Søppelmann (I Want to be a Garbageman), is a case in point. This is manifest in the way the music is made and the way tracks have traditionally been titled. The film maps the DIY culture that led Martinsen and Torske to join forces to build stroboscopes and stage decor for Tromsø's first ever rave, and the emergence of Norway's first indigenous dance music label, Tellé Records, in 1997 (it was funded by a toga party/rave inspired by the movie Animal House, after the main Tromsø scene players relocated to Bergen).Īs well as shining a spotlight on artists such as Mental Overdrive, Torske and later Norwegian dance music notables such as Prins Thomas and Todd Terje, Northern Disco Lights also attempts to define what Norway's cosmic disco music – a genre also known as "Scandolearic", "space disco", or best of all, "one-legged disco" – actually is.īright synths, off-kilter basslines and liberal use of echo and tape-delay effects all play a part, but just as important, perhaps, is a certain childlike playfulness. ![]() They’re also a modest lot, though, so I suppose it took an outsider to do this.” Norwegians can seem quiet on the surface but underneath they’re all bonkers. “For me, personally, there’s also this psychedelic aspect and an undercurrent of eccentricity to Norwegian dance music that I’ve always found appealing. “But the kernel of the idea was: how did this white country at the edge of Europe come to develop such a strong affinity with disco, which is at root a black music form from New York? “We felt it was a largely untold story about an under-appreciated strand of music,” says Davis. With its spectacular, drone-shot footage of Norway’s physical geography, its incisive artist profiles and its use of animation and rare archive footage, the film shows how a country in which skateboarding was illegal until the end of the ’80s became an influential pop-cultural force, thanks to three distinct and sequential “waves” of dance music. These two Englishmen are also the proprietors of Paper Recordings, a record label which has long had close ties with Norway. Three years in the making, Northern Disco Lights was the concept of debut filmmakers Ben Davis and Pete Jenkinson. “That can create a sharp image even if it’s dark, and nature is right on top of you. “You’ve got your Aurora Borealis and you’ve got the snow and the starlit night”, he says from his current base in Bergen. Even today, Tromsø doesn't have a train line."ījørn Torske – the DJ/producer whom the film describes as “the enigmatic genius of Norwegian dance music” – also grew up in Tromsø, and he, too, acknowledges the city’s effect on the creative psyche. Every record we listened to was imported by mail order and radio, and British music magazines like NME and Melody Maker were our only real source of outside information. “We would sit up here and monitor what the humans were up to in other parts of the world,” he says.Ĭhatting to The National from his Tromsø studio, Martinsen elucidates. In Northern Disco Lights, a stylish new documentary about the "cosmic disco" sound that grew out of Tromsø, Norway, one of the world's most northerly cities, Per Martinsen, also known as DJ/producer Mental Overdrive, gives a flavour of growing up in splendid isolation.
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