Musicians
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Serena-Maneesh
Back in 2005, Norway’s Serena-Maneesh found themselves championed by Pitchfork on one side of the Atlantic and Drowned In Sound on the other, and quite suddenly, the band’s self-titled debut became one of those rare things: a genuine word of mouth success. Here was an album that you could lose yourself in and a band you could believe in. Carefully constructed from the familiar (My Bloody Valentine, The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Neu!) and the not so familiar (black metal, Norwegian composers such as Grieg and Fartein Valen), their wall of sound was unlike anything you’d ever heard before.
Now, it’s nearly five years later, and the band is ready to present the world with their follow-up, S-M 2: Abyss In B Minor, set for release on their new label, 4AD, on March 22 / 23rd, 2010.
Currently, the band plays live as a five-piece and on record there are too many contributors to list here, but Serena-Maneesh is essentially Emil Nikolaisen. Born in the remote village of Moi into a musical family (one sister Hilma plays bass with the band, while another, Elvira, sings on Serena-Maneesh’s records and is a pop star in her own right), Emil is Norwegian rock royalty; it’s hard to find a band there that he hasn’t either played with or produced and he’s also been nominated for a Spellemannsprisen, the Norwegian equivalent of a Grammy. He’s not just influential in Norway either: Sufjan Stevens plays vibraphone, flute and piano on the new album, The Dandy Warhols, Nine Inch Nails and Oasis have all invited Serena-Maneesh to tour with them and they are set to release a split single with Fucked Up.
But what exactly has this seemingly prolific perfectionist been doing since 2005? The band spent most of 2006 and the first bit of 2007 on tour, including support slots with Nine Inch Nails, and The Dandy Warhols in addition to Leeds, Reading, SXSW, Siren Fest, and extensive tours all over the world. Starting in 2008, he says he “went back underground”, and he means it quite literally – he spent the time recording the new Serena-Maneesh album, S-M 2: Abyss In B Minor, in a cave on the outskirts of Oslo.
“Studio environments often get on my nerves,” he explains, “and I love the underworld, you can silently head down there and do as you please, leave the world behind. So we found this huge cave with stone walls, it looked like a refugee hideout from World War II, with a huge, undiscovered treasure of sound.”
After spending three days installing microphones and a 24-track, two-inch recorder, Emil hit the button marked ‘Record’ and work began on the album in this “rock’n’roll chamber of magic.” He then spent a further year “in different locations with different people, capturing and gathering moments, failures, sounds”. Then, with the assistance of the likes of Nick Terry, who has worked with Klaxons and Primal Scream, and Can associate René Tinner, he set about mixing the results – spending an incredible eight days on each song.
In this age, given the ease of bedroom recording, records like this one aren’t made very often. It was even mastered at Air Studios by Ray Staff, who did the same for, among many others, Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. But this is no distended double-album; it may open with the eight-minute groove of ‘Ayisha Abyss’, which sounds like a caffeinated Can or something from Funkadelic’s ‘Maggot Brain’, but the whole thing is so concise, so perfectly realised that it’s all over in 38 minutes and 45 seconds. Self-indulgent? No. Self-important? Yes, and rightly so.
The second track ‘I Just Want To See Your Face’ has a terrifying opening section reminiscent of XTRMNTR-era Primal Scream, before turning into an insanely twisted pop song. “It is somehow very pop, isn’t it?,” agrees Emil. Well, yes, there are some incredible, memorable melodies in songs such as ‘D.I.W.S.W.T.T.D’, but the squalling menace of ‘Reprobate!’ and ‘Blow Yr Brains In The Mourning Rain’, the ethereal majesty of ‘Melody For Jaana’ and the slow-motion nightmare of ‘Honeyjinx’ are something else entirely.
Emil is reluctant to talk about his current musical influences, other than to say that they are “quite schizo and all over the place,” but he does admit to one contemporary inspiration – Neil Hagerty of Royal Trux (“I love how he took Ornette Coleman, VU, German ’70s prog and crazy junky white trash nonsense blues and turned them into modern classics in rock’n’roll”) – and another more surprising one: the bossa nova of Antônio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfá, which certainly explains the giddy rhythms and exotic beauty to be found on S-M 2: Abyss In B Minor. “I played quite a few of their standards as a kid and it never left my fingers or my heart,” he explains. “There is something about the mystery of gloom and flamboyance… somehow ambient bossa was the most beautifully haunting sound I had ever heard in my life.” Conveniently this is also the perfect description for the album’s closing track, the magical, mystical ‘Magdalena (Symphony #8)’.
“These are all ingredients for a rather personal and hopefully enchanting brew,” concludes Emil. “I can’t really say how things came out, but Lina Wallinder, who sings a lot on the record, said it sounds like ‘perfumes from vanished times’ and another friend said ‘heavy silk’. I guess that explains…”
Well, sort of. Clearly, something magical happened down there in that cave. Nathaniel Cramp, December 2009
AITA Exclusives:
• A Video Interview with Norway’s Serena-Maneesh
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