After collaborating on a couple of songs – 2009’s The Girl And The Robot and 2010’s None Of Dem – the Norwegian electronic duo Royksopp and the Swedish dance-pop singer Robyn decided to team up on a fully collaborative EP, Do It Again, released this past May.
They followed up with a co-headlining tour, bringing their three-set show (two separate, one together) to North America, Europe and beyond. Last week, a few hours before their Echo Beach stop, NOW’s music editor Julia LeConte sat down with Torbjrn Brundtland, Svein Berge and Robyn to talk about their songwriting process, the Royksopp & Robyn sound, and their respective forthcoming albums.
Julia: You’ve known each other for years, but is there anything you learned about each other on this tour that you didn’t know before?
Robyn: Svein speaks a lot of Finnish when he’s drunk. I never knew that before.
Svein: That’s something I learnt about myself as well, that I didn’t know. A hidden skill that has been lured out the last four days or so.
Robyn: And Torbjrn likes to dance to funk music. I didn’t know that.
Svein: I like to play it, Torbjrn likes to dance to it.
Julia: You’ve created a lot of music together. When you’re on tour, is there ever a time to make songs?
Torbjrn: We try to keep it on the low as to not end up making too many vague plans, because we’ve always been doers, the three of us. If you talk too much about it, you could kill it.
Robyn: Even if you have a really good idea sometimes, it’s good to just keep it to yourself, before you go at it, in a way.
Svein: I think it’s fair to say that we’re not in a hurry and I think Royksopp’s release frequency is so slow that it’s clear that we like to take time and just let the ideas come when they come. Because we really want to make music that we feel isn’t available. It sounds very pretentious, but that is the case.
Julia: It doesn’t sound pretentious. It reminds me of the song Monument, because the lyrics talk about making something permanent that lasts forever. Is that why you decided to make a full project together this time around, instead of a song here or there?
Robyn: Monument, I think, is not a comment on our music-making at all. I think that’s really important, because then it gets really awkward if we’re, you know, making a song about ourselves. It’s more about who you want to be, as a person, in life.
Svein: But it’s fair to say that we want our music to have longevity. We don’t want people to be able to pinpoint exactly what month in a specific year it was made, because it has a certain generic touch of the current production style.
Robyn: Maybe it’s about trying to do something that feels close to you and honest.
Julia: Is it hard – when you’re collaborating – for the music to feel close to all three of you?
Robyn: No, it was easy.
Torbjrn: It’s like when you play a computer game for the first time. When you’re a kid, you’re not familiar with the different types of games. Like a first person game has these rules, and if you’ve played one, obviously you know it. But that little process of learning what the controllers do and what the purpose of the game is – those minutes that you spend there – making music is like that all the time.
Julia: OK. So you guys have mastered the highest level. Or where would you say you are in the game?
Torbjrn: I don’t think anyone really can because what’s really good is so intangible. You can’t write a book about it.
Julia: But you do seem to have mastered what you were talking about before – which is making music that isn’t trendy. Is that just something that came naturally to you?
Robyn: You don’t know what you’re doing really until it’s done. I think it’s very much about the process. If you trust the other people you’re working with, you let go of that “results” way of thinking. But still, you have to invest something of yourself. You have to invest something that hurts a little bit, something that takes a little bit of an effort. Whatever it is – digging deeper or being more adventurous than you thought you would have been.
Julia: Speaking of that process, were you guys ever in the same place when you were making Do It Again? Or were you just sending ideas back and forth?
Svein: Always together, that’s one of the reasons why it turned out the way it did, I think. I’d say 97 per cent of it was made in Norway.
Robyn: Bergen
Torbjrn: It’s just so much fun to go into a studio and have the extra pressure – which is a good pressure that evokes energy – that we don’t have anything, it’s just nothing, and then let’s see what we get. There’s always a few minutes of frustration here and there. So we shouldn’t paint it as a rosy story where we just, you know, sit and laugh and a good track comes out of it.
Julia: A lot of women my age feel like they relate to Robyn’s music we’ve grown up with it. When The Girl And The Robot came out a few years ago, I had just gone through a bad breakup and I thought: “Robyn’s singing to me with this song. It’s exactly how I feel.” But then I realized that just because Robyn’s singing the words doesn’t mean that the whole story is Robyn’s story. It might be Royksopp’s story as well.
Robyn: Exactly.
Julia: And the words don’t really mean anything without the music. So how much of that particular song, and how much all the storytelling in your songs is actually Royksopp?
Robyn: It’s different. But with The Girl And The Robot, as an example, there is a part of the song that is sung by a vocoder. That was there already when I got the music, so those lyrics were already established and then I built a little world around it and we talked a lot about what we all wanted this song to be.
With Do It Again, we wrote everything together from scratch, so it’s different every time. I think one song can mean different things to the three of us, but that’s good also because it makes the song have more layers. I don’t think it has to be so obvious what a song is about as long as you feel like that when you listen to it.
Svein: But just to emphasize what you already have understood: On this particular mini album, it’s not as if Torbjrn and me have made the music and programming completely by ourselves and Robyn has written the lyrics and came and sang it. It is actually that we have sat together, written lyrics together, done the programming together and everything together.
Julia: In a recent interview you said: “We had to define our sound as we went along.” Yet, each song on the EP is so different.
Robyn: I know. It’s schizo…
Svein: I like that because I think it’s cohesive, it still sits together. Not only because it’s Robyn’s vocal chords going through the whole thing, but I think there is a sentiment and a colour for lack of a better word.
Julia: Can you describe the sentiment?
Svein: I guess it’s that thing that people tend to call some sort of Scandinavian “tristesse,” I dunno. I have no idea.
Julia: Could each of you talk about your respective projects? Your new albums?
Svein: We have an album, the Inevitable End coming out, knock on wood, mid-November.
Robyn: It’s great.
Svein: “It’s great” quote, unquote, Robyn. We are also dipping our toes in the same themes, without giving too much away. In comparison to Senior, this has a greater lyrical emphasis and I think that’s probably spawned a bit by the fact that we had been working so close with this woman.
Julia: And your album, Robyn?
Robyn: I’m working on an EP together with Markus Jagerstedt, who is part of my band, and we started working on it together with Christian Falk who is a Swedish producer that I have worked with since I was 15 years old. He sadly passed away a couple of weeks ago. He was one of the most amazing musicians that I’ve ever worked with. We started working on this EP two years ago and then after a year or so I brought in Markus and then the three of us worked on it as a group. After about six months Christian found out that he was really sick and we tried to finish as much as we could.
I think all the things that we have now – it’s going to be five songs – are things that we started together with him. Half of it he’s been there throughout the whole process – we mixed the last song, like, three weeks before he died – and the two last songs that we’re working on now are his musical world, and Markus and I are trying to stay close to the discussions we had with Christian before he got too sick. We’ll finish it as soon we can so we can do it while he’s still – you know – with us, in a way. For me it’s a very nice process to let go of him slowly and I really love the music. It’s very, very good and very special like nothing else I’ve ever done before, nothing else that he’s done before either. I think It’s very special when you make music at a time of your life when you know you’re going to die. He was very happy that he knew that this music was going to come out. Oh, and it’s coming out this year, I hope!
Svein: It’s great by the way.
Robyn: Quote, unquote, Svein from Royksopp.
