Diskjokke - "Staying In"

Diskjokke - Interpolation (Smalltown Supersound 2008)

Diskjokke - Staying In / Smalltown Supersound

This past weekend was disconcerting. I woke up on Friday morning thinking it was Saturday for some reason. I woke up on Sunday morning and realized that I had lost an hour of sleep and all of my clocks had jumped ahead an hour without reminding me why. I woke up on Saturday morning thinking it was last week all set to see The Black Lips play a live in-store performance for Reckless Records, only to find out that it was, in fact, March 8th and not March 1st. "Free pizza and beer!" Michael gushed via text. "The band was okay too." At least, that's what I think it was. He wrote it like a 13-year-old girl and I'm getting too old for modern shorthand.

All of which went to serve my urgency for purchasing two tickets to see Kim Hiorthøy and Bjorn Torske at The Empty Bottle this coming Saturday. I have marked my calendar, but it's not necessarily for the two reasons I've just suggested. At the bottom of the showcase night in small letters and opening for the two Smalltown Supersound heavyweight lies one more reason you need to get on top of things and get out a little. This is Diskjokke.

The Bible, Audiversity Version
A reading from the Norwegian book of Genesis:
1.1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and in a bit of cosmic coincidence, both were named Oslo.
1.2 And the earth was without inorganic form, and void of comparison at the time, and its leader became Prins Thomas; and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and its leader emerged as Lindstrøm. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters to form the Further Into the Future EP.
1.3 And God said, Let this not be a strictly Feedelity affair; that's where Kim Hiorthøy came in.
1.4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness, which also wasn't bad since they were both adept at what they did.
1.5 And God called Oslo together and said, Let's try something that incorporates the best elements of you all. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
1.6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And for whatever that's worth, there was Diskjokke. It was good.

And on and on it goes, I could give you the unabridged version but you'd be up all night and anyway I don't think your mom will let you stay up past your bedtime will she? But there I just pulled one of those 20JFG run-on sentences to illustrate the point that you have to hurry all the descriptions in that you can because if you're not paying attention and waste all your time dropping commas, Staying In will leap out and pass you right by. It's a sneaky record, an extension of the man behind it.

"Other / Freestyle / Hawaiian"? Watch out, casually passing MySpacers, because Joachim Dyrdahl isn't just tearing up the same spaceways that his Norwegian compatriots run saturn strobes around critics with all day. Check out "I Was to Go to Marrocco [sic] and I Don't See You," which in addition to having a thumping bass and fuzzed synth melody, also seems to hide island steel drums and gigantic gourd drums. Much, much larger than Hawaiians intended. Even with the rollicking piano sample from Coati Mundi's "Que Pasa/Me No Pop I" that starts the record off on "Folk I Farta," this still sounds like a tropical record. The tropics in space. Fiji on Venus. Micronesia on Mars.

A classically trained mathematician by trade, Dyrdahl's work on analysis and differential equations thankfully do not make an obvious imprint on the music in a way that, say, it would be the painful centerpiece for Æo³ & ³hæ. This is music ready to be understood and absorbed by more than the mere cognoscenti. Bring it to the masses! Diskjokke deserves as much, and not everyone can afford Sunkissed every weekend.

Dance music has been at the center of a lot of what I've been listening to in the past week - and I admit, my moods ebb and flow pretty freely - but for reasons not yet fully understood, I have latched onto this record and clung to it in a way that eliminates the guilt and the self-consciousness of listening to music so ready to make people dance to. In a perfect world, "Some Signs Are Good" would be on every laptop DJ's iPod playlist, banged at maximum clarity through amazing speakers to an audience receptive to the idea of not hearing Kanye West every week. Maybe that's just daydreaming, but even if it's not possible here, the sine waves are always traveling, and who knows what otherworldly antennae they may be reaching? If Hercules and Love Affair is Ancient Greece uniting us under the earthly empire of disco, Diskjokke is Voyager I on a much bigger mission: converting those whom we have not yet come into contact with yet. It is hard to think of a better interstellar ambassador than, what else, Staying In. See you at The 'Bottle, Joachim.