Collider - The Complexity of Noise and Melody

Among the biggest revelations of 2019, Danish outfit Collider have crafted a multicoloured musical fresco in which noise and melody chase each other relentlessly, trading impressions of shoegaze, noise-rock, jangle-pop, math-rock, folk, progressive and psychedelia. Intrigued by their captivating debut, we got in touch with them to find out more. 

So, before we start, I want to tell you that I discovered your record by pure chance, and I was immediately struck by how it manages to synthesize so many different styles and genres. That said, let's start from your beginnings...

Troels: Mikkel and I have been playing together since childhood, making lo-fi productions in our teenage bedrooms in southern Jutland. Later on, we met our friend and bassist Johan at a gym - he's a real groove wizard. Over the years we've launched various projects, constantly working together to develop a unique voice, something that could transcend everyday life. We lived and did everything together. There was a kind of bubble around us, one that let us escape from everything else. At a certain point we split up and scattered across the world: Johan went to China to practise kung-fu, Mikkel moved to Portugal, while I stayed behind, living with Marie in an apartment in southern Denmark, pretty much cut off from the rest of the country. That's where we started writing songs together. Marie had played in a well-known folk duo with her twin sister and, besides having already played live extensively, had also made records at a young age. Marie's female perspective and musical experience, mixed with the anarchic, spontaneous way we guys had of creating, made us a strong group, but it also caused us some problems. When everyone got back from their travels around the world, we moved into a crappy little twelve-square-metre yellow room in Amager, near Copenhagen, and that's where Collider was born. We played day and night, all sleeping together on a mattress in fairly questionable conditions. That's all we did for a few months.

On your Facebook page, you describe the music you play as “nugaze/ fusion/ psych/ prog/ lo-fi”. I'd say that's a fitting definition, much like your name, Collider, which refers to the clash, the collision of things, of emotions, and so on. Whose idea was that?

Troels: I took the idea from a Lilys song. The word refers to a concept, but at the same time it also suggests a kind of action.

Am I wrong, or does your music also recall your fellow countrymen Mew in places?

Mikkel: I honestly don't think we were thinking about Mew while making our first record, but Troels, Marie and I were huge fans of theirs as kids. I remember when "Frengers" came out: I found it in the school library, on the two little shelves set aside for CDs. Strangely enough, I liked the cover. I took it home. I was floored.

Troels: When we discovered them around the age of twelve, Mew introduced us to adventurous, enormous, dreamlike songs. At that age, walking through nature while listening to their progressive landscapes left an unforgettable, deep impression on us, something none of the music we'd heard up to that point had managed to do. Mew are a truly unique band, and it's hard to tie them to any one particular scene, which I think is something we have in common with them.

On the surface, your music is damn chaotic, yet - correct me if I'm wrong - I think it's the result of extremely deliberate songwriting. By the way, I find the flute work throughout the album really interesting...

Marie: The chaos comes from both composition and intuition. And thanks for the flute comment... though I have an advantage there, since I don't share the same kind of musicality as the other members of the band. It seems the music came out in a different way for me. After all, my musical background is quite different from theirs.

Which bands and musicians most inspired your music?

First of all, the essence of our songwriting comes from a place ruled by spontaneity, because we rely heavily on the truth of intuition. But of course, beyond that, our songs draw on many different musical aesthetics. Back when we decided to live together, we got obsessed with dirty-sounding indie rock, especially from the 90s. We could go on forever, so this is just a small, random list of some of the bands that had a big impact on us: experimental, out-there bands like Swirlies and Polvo, for their twisted rhythms and their shattered-sounding tempos and instruments; noise-rock bands such as Drop Nineteens, Yo La Tengo (with their "boy/girl" aesthetic and unfiltered sound), the early records of Brian Jonestown Massacre, Lilys, Medicine, Helium, Deerhoof, All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors, but also Hella and, of course, Sonic Youth, who all left their mark. I'd also add the vulnerability and the oblique slowcore textures of bands like Seam, Red House Painters, Duster and Codeine. And then there's the pale naïveté of British shoegaze acts like Pale Saints, My Bloody Valentine, Lush, Ride and the Scottish twee-pop band Pastels. Beyond any category, there's also the wonderful music of Mahogany, His Name Is Alive, the early fragile, hyper-melodic works of Magnetic Fields, and even the atmosphere created by Stereolab.

When Collider set off on their journey in 2015, we mixed all of that with contemporary vibes, always keeping an eye on the world around us too. We like pairing different musical layers that seem incompatible on the surface. We started blending 90s music with influences coming from "vaporwave" (Hong Kong Express, New Dreams Ltd.), from lots of modern psychedelic pop bands like Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Connan Mockasin, Tame Impala, Caribou, TOPS and so on (there wasn't one band that stood out above the rest: what mattered was a kind of general zeitgeist). But we also grew fond of the crazy, layered lo-fi pop of Ariel Pink and the endless minimal melodies of Arthur Russell. In 2018, in Los Angeles, we saw a live show by Palm, an experimental math-rock band that really blew our minds. Their style is so complex, and in a way it reorganizes the arrangement structures of rock, which we found really inspiring.

If your record were a mosaic, which albums would it be made of?

Troels: Honestly, I think it's hard to reconstruct it that way, because at the root of our songwriting, of our ability to put together lots of different things, there's a lot of instinct. Still, these records left important traces on our sound:

Duster – “Stratosfera”

Drop Nineteens – “Mayfield” (it's a demo tape, truly amazing!!!)

Magnetic Fields – “The Wayward Bus” e “Distant Plastic Trees”

Mahogany – “The Dream Of A Modern City” e “Connectivity”

My Bloody Valentine – “Ecstasy And Wine”

Pale Saints – “The Comforts Of Madness”

All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors – “Turning Into Small”

Lush – “Scar”

Yo La Tengo – “Electr-o-Pura”

Brian Jonestown Massacre – “Diane Perry Tape”

Red House Painters – “I” (Rollercoaster) “II” (Bridge)

Swirlies – “Blonder Tongue Audio Baton” + “They Spent Their Youthful Days…”.

How do your songs usually come about?

Mikkel: Some songs – like “DG” or “Sniper” – come straight out of improvisations and get developed by all of us at the same time. Most of them, though, start with Troels, who usually turns up in the studio with a part or a whole song already written. Often we get carried away and play the song in ways that end up quite different from one another, only to finish it by bringing the different parts together into a multifaceted whole.

What are your songs about?

Troels: The lyrics almost always come from improvisation. Bit by bit they get refined, and that's how what we actually want to say becomes clearer. They often stem from a desire to fix our own inner confusion, and they revolve around questions like: "How can you get out of a troubled psychological state?", "How can you reach a certain state of consciousness?", "What does it take to unlock our personal potential?"

The lyrics usually deal with contradictions and collisions, with dependence on relationships versus being alone and independent, with questioning experiences through dreams and escapism (as our main mode of existence) versus our relationship with others; the responsibility of the real, external world, the issues tied to responsibility… which world is real? Sometimes, though, our songs are just snapshots of our search for the right inspiration: that's the case with "Daisy", which is a manifesto (as you wrote in your review), an anthem built on our ability to reach that crazy, chaotic mood we need in order to play our music.

In a track like "Glockster", I hear echoes of "Isn't Anything", the debut album by My Bloody Valentine. What's your relationship with Kevin Shields' band?

Troels: All right, all right, all right! It's a really groovy record, incredibly beautiful and unsettling. To me, My Bloody Valentine are tied to skiing… Some bands are simply more fashionable and ahead of their time… (As the German artist Jonathan Meese put it, "In art you have to go beyond the limit").

Marie: Right! You can't be ahead of your time if you're following your own time.

The cover you chose for the album is very effective at capturing the "multicolored complexity" of your music. Who made it?

Mikkel: That was Troels. He took the photo in a garden and was completely confident about what he was doing. I, on the other hand, wasn't so sure. I thought it was too impressionistic. Afterwards, Troels made four different color combinations trying to get the effect he wanted. I completely gave in to his idea once the idea came up of printing the record in all four different versions. It was perfect.

Marie: Troels took the photo a few years ago, using his phone at my family's holiday house. He was always walking around taking pictures, but never with a good camera. Quality and high "pixelization" have never interested him at all. I think it's more about manipulating reality. Honestly, I think looking at the cover gives you an idea of what the inside of Troels's brain looks like.

Are you already thinking about the next album?

Mikkel: We think about the next album, and everything that's to come, a lot. For now, we're juggling a lot of material. Too much for a single LP, and yet it still doesn't feel finished! So we still don't really know what the future holds, but we're very excited and pretty sure we'll release something in the spring.

Marie: The next album will definitely be full of seductions, rabbits pulled out of hats as usual, flowers, problems, wrestling and pizza…

Troels: The songs on this year's album were written in 2015/16, and since then our style could be described as more precise, more airy, simpler, like an abridged edition. We already had enough songs for a new record when we released the first one, but we feel the urge to dig deeper. For this autumn's tour, we mostly rehearsed new songs, among other things stretching out the set with a bit of improvisation. Lately I've been thinking a lot about Hemingway; the last few weeks have all revolved around Hemingway; wandering around without any real purpose, in a romantic atmosphere: to me, all of that is tied to our new record, and it will shape it unmistakably.

What do you do for a living, besides playing music?

Mikkel: We don't do much besides playing. Marie is finishing her studies in naturopathy, which is a kind of holistic natural medicine.

Troels: The three of us went to the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen and had a lot of social support and facilities to make our music.

What's the state of the Danish indie-rock scene? Do you feel part of it, or are you lone wolves?

Marie: Being part of something sucks! But luckily there are plenty of other lone wolves around Copenhagen. And even though the scene here is small, it's a pleasure to be part of it. Everyone is making their own small contribution. Some are more nonconformist than others.

Mikkel: There are a lot of friends here making music that we support: Tettix Hexxer, Birthgiving Toad, Himmelrum, Disarmer, Realism, Clarissa Connelly, the ones connected to our label Escho, and the list could go on… We go to each other's gigs, we play in each other's bands, and I think magazines and critics have really embraced us too, but some of our venues and areas have been abandoned or have disappeared, and for now it feels like the scene is missing some of the space it had just a couple of years ago.

Is there anything that sets Danish indie-rock apart from that of the rest of the world, or is it too dependent on foreign models?

Troels: The Danish coastline, with its wide-open spaces and grey, windswept weather, is a source of inspiration for indie bands. There's definitely a Scandinavian way of being airy and dreamy in rock, as you can hear, for instance, in our fellow countrymen Entrepeneurs, with all their bombastic scope, or in Norway's Serena Maneesh, or Sweden's Westkust. The atmosphere is as sharp as ice, colder and brighter than most of the American indie scene. We draw inspiration from plenty of other things, but there's still an intrinsically Danish melodic tradition that persists.

Mikkel: If there's one thing that really sets the Danish scene apart, it's probably that, where we're from, it's fairly easy to make music. It's also not that hard to find a job. At least compared to other places.

If an Italian wanted to get into the history of Danish rock and indie-rock, which records should they absolutely listen to?

“Dødens Triumf” (1972) by Savage Rose is an absolute classic. We recently played a cover of theirs. It was fun to connect our music with old Danish progressive rock.

During our teenage years, “Mafia” (2006) by epo-555 meant a lot to us, as did “Eggs” (2009) by Oh No Ono, “Zitilites” (2003) by Kashmir, “Lust Lust Lust” (2007) by the Raveonettes, and “A Triumph For Man” (1997) plus the other Mew album already mentioned. It was a period of many flawlessly executed records. Later on, everything splintered into the contemporary experimental scene that gave us records by Synd & Skam, Thulebasen, First Flush (we love their albums “Spira” and “Fu-Wa”), Iceage, Love Coffin, Lower, Pardans and Himmelrum. These are records that offer a great way to dive into the Danish rock scene.

For hardcore, there are also the evolved progster outfit Gooms, who recently put out a fluid, unsettling work titled “V1 (Descent)”.

Our friends in Realism have put out a record called “Like Seashells To The Change”, which we consider an absolute must; it's r'n'b twisted into vaporwave and contaminated with spacey psych-rock stuff. Lasse Bækby, the band's frontman (and also the lead voice on Gooms' “V1 (Descent)”), also runs the project Birthgiving Toad, likewise centred on some crazy experimental rock music.

Your ten favourites of 2019?

It seems to have been a strange year. Ask us about 2018 and records by Palm, Mid Air Thief, Spirit of the Beehive, MGMT would easily find a place...

DIIV – “Deceiver”

Alex G – “House Of Sugar”

Vegyn – “Text While Driving If You Want To Meet God!”

Vegyn – “Only Diamonds Cut Diamonds”

Empath – “Active Listening: Night On Earth”

Girlpool – “What Chaos Is Imaginary”

Cryogeyser – “Glitch”

SASAMI – “SASAMI”

Erika de Casier – “Essentials”

Birthgiving Toad – “Inserts Brahm”

And what about your picks from the last decade?

Ugh... this is where it gets tough...

Unknown Mortal Orchestra – “II” (2013)

Tame Impala – “Lonerism” (2012)

Serena Maneesh – “No 2: Abyss in B Minor” (2010)

Hella – “Tripper” (2011)

Deerhoof – “Apple O’” (2010)

Palm – “Rock Island” (2018)

Mid Air Thief – “Crumbling” (2018)

MGMT – “MGMT ”(2013) and Little Dark Age (2013/2018)

DIIV – “Is The Is Are” (2016)

Kurt Vile – “Smoke Ring For My Halo” (2011)

Bubbly picks:

Landing – “Landing” (2012)

Pospulenn – “Sun People Sleepwalker” (2010) (beyond guitarloopy tape-ambient)

Have you ever been to Italy? What do you know about our music? Is there any band and/or artist you particularly love?

Troels: I often come to Italy on holiday, mostly to go hiking, cycling and skiing in the mountains. To be honest, I don't know much about Italian music, apart from being familiar with italo-style.

Mikkel: Last autumn I became completely obsessed with a record by Roberto Musci called "Tower Of Silence". Even today it sounds absolutely lovely.

Before we wrap up, would you like to add anything else?

We'd love to come play for you in Italy! We're working on putting together a European tour in 2020, and we hope we manage to pull it off and play some sick noise for you!

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