"Self-taught magic from a book" is the debut album from two Norwegian girls and two English boys in a band with a French name, Je Suis Animal. The album is released today, and I must say I’ve waited a long time for this record. in fact, I’ve waited for it for about as long as I’ve run this blog.

I think I heard Je Suis Animal for the first time in 2005, and their sound was so different from everything other Norwegian bands did at the time. Their sound is still different, and the album has become a wonderful collection of dreamy, sharp-edged pop songs with influences from several decades of alternative music.

Before we let the band tell us more about the album, and how it was to record in the middle of the woods with a bear lurking around, we just have to look at their new video for one of the songs on the new album. "The Mystery of Marie Roget" is directed by Amund Hesbøl, and obviously inspired by the Bunuel/Dali classic "Un Chien Andalou" from 1929.

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Before you start reading our interview with the band, I advice you to open their myspace in a separate window and press play on the music player. Then come back here and read the rest while listening!

We asked two of the founding members of Je Suis Animal, Anthony Barratt and Elin Grimstad, how they would describe their own music.

    ANTHONY: Dreamy indie pop with some experimental elements. We like making light melodic pop songs, which under the surface lurks something a bit darker.

    ELIN: Yeah, the themes I write about often have a sinister or strange twist to them. I would say we play melodic indie pop, inspired by 60’s pop and psychedelia as well as 80’s indie pop. We like the naive combined with the more complex. 

Tell us the story about how it all started, and I’m also curious about WHERE it all started? How did you meet each other?

    ANTHONY: I met Elin eight years ago at art school in Bath, England. We shared the video editing studio – she was making cutout animation films and I was playing around with sound and to the frustration of my tutors, calling it art! There weren’t many people in Bath that were into indie music. She played me a tape of some songs she had made on 4-track, and I thought it was great so we started to make demos at her apartment.
Elin moved back to Norway in 2003. She found Merete through a mutual friend, and Matt joined the band on drums even though he had never played drums before. I came to Oslo to visit Elin in the summer of 2004. We had a few jams in a tiny room at Hersleb Skole and it was great fun. That whole trip to Oslo was fantastic and so I moved here six months later.

Your new album "Self taught Magic from a Book" is released today on the small indie-label Perfect Pop records. The story of how it was recorded is quite special, and I’ve heard that it includes a bear and a community hall in the middle of the woods… Tell us the whole story!

    ANTHONY: We first came into contact with Perfect Pop three years ago, after they heard our demo, which we’d recorded on minidisks and a few crap microphones in that tiny room at Hersleb Skole. We rushed into Spendless Studios, where most Perfect Pop bands make their albums. But it was a catastrophe! We probably drove the poor sound engineer insane. We were only really comfortable playing together, and so layering each instrument individually didn’t work for us at all. There wasn’t the option to record as a band because the live room was so small. Things took too long to get right and we basically ran out of time and energy.

I’ve often thought that there’s a certain magic created when a band plays together and that doesn’t always come across when you layer the instruments separately. Being a fan of sixties music I started reading about the distant microphone techniques that engineers used back then. When you use that approach, you’re not looking to separate things from one another, it’s more a case of getting a nice sound from very few microphones. We had already bought an 8-channel desk at the start of 2006 with some money we got for ‘Fortune Map’ being used in the film Tommy’s Inferno. As we were intending to use that desk for these recordings, it was a basic necessity to use distant miking in order to record everything together live. We didn’t have hundreds of channels and microphones available to us, but friends of ours kindly leant us what they could. What we needed was a room that had a nice natural ambience.

A friend of ours knew of a really remote community hall in the woods in Hedalen. It looked pretty scary in the photograph! But it had a great big room with nice acoustics and plenty of space for everyone to play. So we booked it. Then we were told to watch out, as a bear had killed some cattle on a nearby farm. Finding the community hall on the way down was like something out of a horror film as it was so foggy and dark. Fortunately we found the place and got all the gear inside without meeting our grizzly neighbour. We stayed there for a week and pretty much worked non-stop. It was just a pity that there weren’t any showers!

The best thing about recording in the middle of the woods is that there is very little to distract you, and you can start or finish at any time of the day. Some of the songs were recorded bright and early in the morning, whereas others were done late at night. It’s interesting how this can affect the music. It was also very beautiful and inspiring to look out the windows whilst playing and see the snow falling or fog coming down.

What I’ve heard so far from the new album sounds in my opinion both lighter and more "pop" than the older songs. Do you agree? How do you feel that the sound of Je Suis Animal has developed since you released your debut single "Fortune Map" in 2005?

    ANTHONY: I think that there came a point when we felt like developing songs a bit further. We stopped playing concerts immediately after our debut single was released which I suppose is a bit of an odd way to do things for a band just starting out. It felt like it was time to focus on writing, jamming and just trying different things. We have always loved pop music – the golden age of pop, that is. The songs on our album are all pretty varied in their arrangements as we were exploring what the ’sound’ of the band could be.

One of your songs is called "The Mystery of Marie Roget", which, if I’m right, is named after a dark murder mystery-story written by Edgar Allan Poe. You seem to like scary, dark and sinister themes for your songs, even for the most upbeat popsongs… Am I right? Are books in general a source of inspiration for you?

    ELIN : A lot of things inspire me. Art, books, mystery stories, strange phenomenons, magic, poems, songs. And of course the people I know, things that happen, things that you’d wish happened, boyfriends, love off course and so on…

You’ve spent nine months making songs for the new album. How is a song by Je suis animal born?

    ANTHONY: Nine months sounds like ages, but it didn’t feel like that. We started recording the rehearsals onto minidisk and that was useful as it meant we could take away ideas and work on them at home. Sometimes Elin would bring a finished song or she and I would write together, or we would jam something out until it turned into something else. One of the sweetest songs on the album, ‘Rousseau World’, came out of jamming like that. It’s handy recording rehearsals when a song almost writes itself like that. There’s a whole mountain of jams and unfinished ideas, which will probably pop up in future songs.

The album is released at almost the same time as you play on one of Norway’s most important festivals, By:Larm. Last time you played on By:larm (2005), you were contacted by a director who wanted your song in his movie (Tommy’s inferno). What do you hope will happen after this years by:larm?

    ANTHONY: It would be nice to play lots around Scandinavia and the rest of Europe… especially some festivals this summer. Hopefully there will be some booking agencies at our gigs!

The sound of Je Suis Animal should be heard by the world! What are your plans for the release outside of Norway?

    ANTHONY: Thank you! We’ve got plans to license the album in Australia and Japan. We’re looking to license it in the UK and US too.

I’ve waited with this one, but I just have to ask… Je suis animal….. a French name on a band from Norway and England. What is the French connection?

   ELIN: To be honest – nothing really, but it sounds good – don’t you think? We like the French language. And the fact it’s grammatically wrong. And we really like French films and the Paris art movement in the 1920/30. I like wearing a beret too.

Let’s talk about your influences… On your myspace, you mention a lot of influences from the 80s and 90s like The Shop Assistants, My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab, The Pastels, Talulah Gosh ++, but you’ve also got several 60s and 70s references on your list, like The Shangri-Las, Joe Meek, Nico and Faust, just to name a few. Are there any bands from the present that you feel inspired by or admire? …And… What do you think about the reunion of My Bloody Valentine?

    ANTHONY: We like Broadcast very much. One of the best concerts I’ve ever seen was when they played London just before the release of their Pendulum EP. They were incredible and totally far out in a really psychedelic way. There’s also some lovely library style music being released on Ghost Box, a label affiliated with Broadcast. Another band we’ve all been listening to lately is Mahogany from New York… gorgeous dream pop but very upbeat and good to dance to.

    I can’t quite believe that My Bloody Valentine are playing together again… let alone playing in Oslo. But I guess there’s a bit of a fan base here. It must be for the money but still… I am excited. Tell you the truth I’ve got my ear plugs at the ready! Give me that holocaustic one chord! Actually these days Elin and I are hooked on the early stuff, especially Ecstasy & Wine because the songs are so good. But I’d be surprised if they played anything from that album.

All our interviews in Eardrums end with a "Top5 of everything".  What is Je suis animal’s "Top5 of everything"?

    Top 5 Animals We’d Like To Be

    1. Owl
    2. Rhinoceros
    3. Squirrel
    4. Koala Bear
    5. Giraffe

Je Suis Animal play a release-concert at Blaa in Oslo today at 20:00. You can download two of their songs at NRK Urört. The album can be bought from Platekompaniet and other good recordshops from today on.

Here is a live video from Je Suis Animal’s performance at Blaa 28. April 2007:

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