Sixties surf-kitsch classic Gidget starts rolling as the drummer counts the band in. The singer sounds like Morrissey and dresses like Ian Curtis, but his long blond hair and the colourful lei around his neck is in tune with the surf theme, not to mention the fact that his instrument of choice is a ukulele.
It’s the kick-off night of a brand new live series, Live Audio, and Bonden is filled with curious concert-goers checking out Bert & The Family as they provide the live soundtrack for the film. This is definitely not your average indie band; in fact it’s one of the freshest and most fun emerging acts I’ve seen on Stockholm’s music scene.
Lara Szabo Greisman, coordinator of the series, relocated to Stockholm from Vancouver a couple of years ago to get a masters degree in curating. During that time she’s worked with museums such as Historiska, Moderna, and Kulturhuset, as well as running the annual music festival Make Music STHLM.
“I’m usually a lot more politically engaged, working with immigrants and minorities, but I also work as a cultural producer. You could say I have two sides to my practice – one more serious and one more new wave.”
“The idea of Live Audio was to build on that old silent film concept of having a live soundtrack that tells you how and when to feel. We take older films whose values have changed and have musicians interpret the films by creating these soundtracks live, and we’re seeing some really interesting translations come out of this. The plan is to work with emerging musicians in as wide variety of genres as possible.”
“Our second night was just a couple of days after the Bert & The Family/Gidget pairing and was attended by even more people than the first. For that we cut together a film from all those robot movies from the 50s, featuring all these tacky and horrible robots made from cardboard boxes and stuff. The DJ played electronic dance music with an aftertaste of pure nerd-dome, using samples from the films and things like the Darth Vader breath. It was amazing.”
“We already have events planned for January, and are even planning as far ahead as next Halloween, where we’re going to do Nosferatu with a live orchestra. We’re very excited about that!”
