Secret Moments…
New year’s eve. One hand clasping a big banger, other hand a lighter. A bottle of champagne in the pocket. Starting the banger with the lighter. Banger being thrown away, lighter slit into the pocket. The moment gaze hits the thing which should’ve been the banger, realize that same thing is the lighter. Smile as you know it’s too late to get the banger out of your pocket in time.
… A SECRET MOMENT!
Unlike most people, IDEE DES NORDENS have not forgotten how to smile in situations like this.
They are sincerely devoted to the charm of these moments, when things happen that really shouldn’t. On their second album, bearing the name Secret Moments, they present in pleasingly audible form the perfectionate art of creating secret moments, which can be found in the moment of suspense when doing the right thing at the wrong time and the wrong thing at the right time.
Thus, the music of IDEE DES NORDENS could be called antipodean. A text on the north is combined with a warm reggae loop (“Secret Moments”), in ecstatic rapture metal guitars meet an orchestra from some Indian movie (“India”), Fips Asmussen tells a joke when really nobody wants to hear it (“Song for Giso”), a double-speed Hippieband is racing Gabbatechno (“Rev.”).
The final piece on the CD, “Riders on the Storm”, a Doors-cover version, has got numerous antipodeans relating to each other - a Secret Moment at it’s best - when the country instrument dobro plays the melody along with a Jazz saxophone, whilst, in the background, a swaying, spinning Nana Mouskouri-loop creates atmosphere, and is finally taken over by a glittery, modern keyboard sound.
The art of living in the inaproppriate, enjoying the clashing of unrelated situations, never attempting to reconcile or calculate the incompatible - IDEE DES NORDENS have refined this art into philosophical realms. But they do not suffer from a lack of reality; on the opposite, IDEE DES NORDENS lay great stress on being practicable.
Let’s close our information with a tip for advanced students, successfully tested by ourselves and highly recommended for perfectionating the art of not only doing the inaproppriate for other people, but also for yourself:
Missed the last but one subway home by one minute. Sit down, look at the empty platform. Got nothing to read. Check the watch several times, work out in how many minutes the train comes in. Finally a bunch of people comes along. Most of them one minute before the subway arrives.
Slowly it comes in, stops. The doors open, people are getting out and inside. Sit on the bench, watch the doors closing. Outside it’s raining. Half an hour home by foot. The train leaves.
- Idee des Nordens, Spring 1997