Late last year, crazy Nordic loop rockers Aiming For Enrike exploded into mine and many other’s ears, the beastly warped grooves of the duo’s third LP, Las Napalmas, making waves across the wierdo rock community. Their tunes – funky, psyched out and explorative – meshed the inventive looping of bands like VASA and the brutalist riffage of the Poly-Male Cleft-Hound school, with wider sensibilities drawn from hip-hop and dance music, to build vivid and genuinely exhilarating pieces which effortlessly skirt any gimmicky pit-falls looping can pose. Ahead of their upcoming UK tour, drummer Tobias Ørnes Andersen answered a few questions…
FB: Who/what is Enrike?
TØA: Someone we both love, hate and sometimes emulate.
FB: Using looping means that songs can easily become boring yet AFE totally avoids this. How do you go about keeping everything interesting? Could you speak a bit about your songwriting process?
TØA: When we write a song we often spend the most time on structure, build up, not overusing hooks and stuff like that. We basically try to structure most of our songs like pop songs. Neither of us really listen to music based on technical skills or anything like that.
FB: There’s a lot of quite different sounds across your material. Do I detect a dance music/hip hop influence? What other sort of stuff inspires you?
TØA: There has definitely been a development towards dance music for the past couple of years in our song writing. With inspirations from Mr Oizo, Justice, Talking Heads, Louis Cole, Todd Terje, James Brown, John Hopkins, 80s sci-fi synths and lots of other stuff. The hip hop influences are from the likes of J Dilla and D´Angelo. Other bands we like are for instance Wilco, Sonic Youth, Meshuggah, Preoccupations, Courtney Barnett, Big Thief, Mac Demarco, Tame Impala, The Band, Big Star, REM, Jaga Jazzist, Lindstrøm, Hot Snakes, Fela Kuti, Queens of the Stone Age, Deerhoof, Radiohead etc etc etc.
FB: I could name a few Norwegian experimental bands but the scene doesn’t seem massive. What are shows like for experimental music out there? Any bands you’d recommend?
TØA: There is some genre mixing experimental music going on in Norway and people seem pretty open to checking out different types of music. There isn’t a massive scene but we have a pretty good following in Norway, and there are also other genre blending experimental bands like for instance Pom Poko, Monkey Plot, Broen, Invader Ace, Noxagt, Jaga Jazzist etc. If i have to recommend one Norwegian experimental band it would be MoHa. I have listened a lot to their last record One-Way Ticket To Candyland. (FB: This album is very good)
FB: What does the future hold for AFE?
TØA: Right now we are making our 4th album which we will start releasing singles for in the spring of 2019. Aside from the upcoming UK-tour there is talk about doing our first China-tour, our second India-tour, a European tour and a US-tour. We´d basically like to tour as much as possible.
If you’re an inhabitant of the Queen’s Kingdom, you can catch Aiming For Enrike on their upcoming UK tour:
Bristol 10/10
Brighton 11/10
London 12/10
Sheffield 13/10
Manchester 14/10
Edinburgh 15/10
Glasgow 16/10
Liverpool 17/10