Those Norwegians
Of all the places to find a house music revolution, Tromsø, a city far inside the Arctic Circle in northern Norway, might be the least likely. Yet in the early '90s a small electronic scene grew up there that would go on to shape Scandinavian dance music for decades, and Those Norwegians came straight out of it.
The original lineup was Rune Lindbæk, Ole Johan Mjøs and Torbjørn Brundtland. Mjøs and Lindbæk had already worked together in groups including Open Skies and Volcano, and Brundtland would later form Röyksopp with Svein Berge, which says plenty about the talent concentrated in that small northern scene.
In that first incarnation the group released a handful of singles and the acclaimed album Kaminzky Park on Manchester's Paper Recordings in 1997. It is dance music full of disco, sample trickery and funky rhythms, and the title is a pun on Comiskey Park, the Chicago stadium that hosted the infamous Disco Demolition Night in 1979. Naming a disco-loving house album after the site of disco's public burning is the kind of joke that tells you exactly who they were: knowing, irreverent and in love with the music.
The same period brought The Kilpisjärvi EP and Da Kingue D'mazda in 1997, an appearance on Virgin's 1998 compilation Deep Sea Drilling: Sounds From The Norwegian Underground, and "Kakao" and "Never Been To NY" on Paper in 2000. They were in demand as remixers too, working for labels including Glasgow Underground, Jazzland, Musiques Hybrides, UCM and Estereo. Their music later turned up on Paper's 2003 retrospective of its first hundred releases and on the 2017 soundtrack to the film Northern Disco Lights.
After that, the producers went their separate ways. Lindbæk carried the project on with Gaute Drevdal until it went quiet. Lindbæk, who has been releasing music since 1992, went on to produce with the Idjut Boys and Lindstrøm and to remix The Knife, José González and Bryan Ferry, while Brundtland's work with Röyksopp took Norwegian electronic music to a worldwide audience.
The Those Norwegians sound was playful but deep: rubbery basslines, filtered disco loops, unexpected samples and a sense of humour that never undercut the groove. It fitted neatly into the late-'90s moment when house producers from Oslo to San Francisco were rediscovering disco's warmth, and in hindsight it points toward the Nordic disco sound that followed.
On Red Melon, Those Norwegians released "Toons," a track first heard on Kaminzky Park. It is playful deep tech house with a pitched-down laugh motif and a late, acid-tinged lead, the kind of record that makes a dancefloor grin. Dano later picked it for his Golden Gate Grooves mix.
It is a fitting home for the track. Red Melon has always liked its house funky, dubby and a little mischievous, and few groups ever captured that combination better than three friends from the Arctic Circle who named their album after a disco riot.
