“
Apparatijk are too much like pop
musicians for the art world and
too arty for the music world”
Wikipedia will tell you that Apparatjik formed for a charity album
in 2008 and consist of Furuholmen, Coldplay’s Berryman, Swedish
producer Martin Terefe (who’s worked with the likes of James
Morrison and KT Tunstall) and Jonas Bjerre, singer/guitarist of
Danish alt-rockers Mew. Furuholmen points out that Bjerre comes
from a film, animation and painting background (see jonasbjerre.
com for some of his darkly bizarre creations).
They’ve since produced two well-received albums, but they’ve
become just as well known for their live shows, usually in art
galleries, in which they take to a giant semi-transparent cube called
the Light Space Modulator, wearing bizarre costumes that hide their
identity as the cube is bombarded with projections. They recently
replaced their astronaut outfits with comedy muscle suits, shiny gas
masks, war helmets topped with antlers and bejewelled jockstraps –
or “disco balls” as Furuholmen says they should be known.
The Light Space Modulator is inspired by Hungarian Bauhaus
painter and photographer, László Moholy-Nagy, who in 1930 created
a pioneering cube sculpture called
Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen
Bühne
(
Light Prop for an Electric Stage
),
essentially a set of kitchen
utensils creating shadows around a light bulb, which was later
known as the Light Space Modulator. Furuholmen calls the band’s
performances in the modern version “something like an amateur
dance group coupled with shadow theatre”, though the visuals
projected onto the cube are more akin to Space Invaders on acid.
Things get more discombobulating when Furuholmen starts
talking about whether the band members really are in the cube:
“
We’re playing around with that. Sometimes it might not be me – I
mean, maybe there’s a better me than me.”
He clearly wants to be an artist rather than a personality, though his
personality tends to get in the way of that.
He prefers talking about ideas and is drawn into quite a few
musing monologues, delivered with lingering looks into the middle
distance as he polishes off his steak sandwich: about the ill-fated
“
Irony-Free Hour” he instituted in A-ha – it “irritated the hell” out of
lead singer Morten Harket, apparently – or his considered opinion
that “Norwegians are just Viking peasants greased with oil”.
He finally takes off the aviators and gets on topic when I tell him
that Apparatjik’s
Combat DiscoMusic
,
an upbeat pop-synth track
punctuated by kung-fu grunts, has made it onto my summer 2013
playlist. “We made that track because, one, none of us can dance
and, two, none of us likes disco music,” he smiles – not the only time
I wonder if he’s being serious.
Furuholmen’s favourite quote about the band came from the
director of Berlin’s National Gallery, who said: “Apparatijk are too
much like pop musicians for the art world and too arty for the
music world.” Furuholmen agrees, saying they’re “happy to fall into
the space in between”, and citing Lars von Trier, James Joyce and
Edvard Munch as his influences.
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