NeoL

――In 2014, you announced that “the Inevitable End” would be your last album, so it was a nice surprise to hear your new music. What inspired you to start this new project, “Profound Mysteries”?


Torbjørn Brundtland: To be honest, what we meant when we said that it was the last album, I think we meant the last traditional album. We felt that the album art starting with “Melody A.M.” and ending with “the Inevitable End” was kind of like a finished piece of art, but we still wanted to make music. So not so long after we started “Lost Tapes,” the project where we very low-key just released music without too much fanfare, things that we had that just hadn’t found its way onto an album before but we still felt should be released, at the same time, we talked a lot about how we wanted to do a different way of releasing music. It obviously took some time to come up with the concept, but the concept is “Profound Mysteries” and it’s not an album. It’s not the way it’s been done before, where you make an album and maybe you have one or two singles, and then you release the album. It’s more of a stream, like a river of music where music just flows down and keeps coming. That’s the idea with “Profound Mysteries.”


――When did you start working on this project?


Torbjørn Brundtland: Hmm, five days ago? [Laughs] I don’t know. Svein, what’s the real answer to that?


Svein Berge: I think the real answer depends on how you look at it. Just to go straight to the oldest track in terms of the oldest idea, it actually stems all the way back to when we were teenagers, like 14, 15. The track “Unity” is actually an idea that we made back in the 90’s when rave was the big thing in our lives. So that’s kind of the oldest idea. But I think it’s fair to say that we kicked off just before the pandemic.


――This is an epic multimedia project with visualizers and artifacts made by Jonathan Zawada and all these short films. Did you have all these ideas from the beginning?


Svein Berge: We wanted the project to be more than just the music, so that was an idea that came early when shaping the concept. I’m going to toot our own horn here a bit, but we like to think that Röyksopp is very unique in terms of our sounds and what our music sounds like. And we somehow wanted to emphasize that as much as we could by making it evident to the listeners and also the viewers the fact that we are fairly eclectic in our genre jumping. We wanted to emphasize that and I think that’s underlined pretty good with the artifacts and also the Bacon, the short movies, because they are so widespread in terms of their expressions. So that idea came quite early on, in particular with Jonathan Zawada, and also how we should make these artifacts and how one should respond to them when looking at them. Because you don’t really know what they are, what their purpose is or what they feel like. So we just wanted to trigger some sort of imagination in people. It’s all very abstract, but that was the idea.





――Somehow those visualizers are meditating and I can watch them forever. It’s kind of healing.


Torbjørn Brundtland: Good, nice.


Svein Berge: We like that. It’s really down to the eye of the beholder, particularly the artifacts, what you find in it and how it resonates with you. It really boils down to imagination and those kinds of things and which is something that the whole “Profound Mysteries” is, I guess, celebrating. The imagination and the pondering of everything, which is something that we enjoy, Torbjorn and myself.


――This time again, you have great collaborators on the project including Susanne Sundför and Jamie irrepressible who were on your previous albums. I was surprised that you have Astrid S who is from a pop background. How did she come on board?


Svein Berge: This sounds a bit manipulative on our end, but we like the idea to surprise, I guess. Whether we pull that off successfully, I don’t know, but it’s interesting to bring, as you say, someone like Astrid who comes from that background into our world, which still is pop, but it’s a different kind of pop. Obviously. it’s not mainstream, commercial pop in the same extent and see what we can do. I guess we are the indie movie of music, if you know what I mean. It’s like you have someone tagging along and doing some sort of Joel and Ethan Cohen movie. That’s comparing us to Cohen Brothers [laughs.] But the Cohen Brothers without the budget.


Torbjørn Brundtland: I like the comparison. Indie filmmakers that get to work with an actor or actress who are known for more commercial projects. But also, we really, really like her voice, of course.





――“Profound Mysteries I” and “Profound Mysteries II” sound very different. I thought Part II is a little more nostalgic and melancholic. Did you intentionally make them sound different?


Svein Berge: Yes. Again, this is going to sound a bit pretentious, but every single track, every single bar has been put where it is with the intention. There’s no sort of arbitrary fluke that things ended up the way they did. It’s actually something we spent quite a lot of time on. Again, it depends on the beholder, but what we tried to do was to keep the first part of it sort of secretive a bit, sort of introspective and hidden almost, as that was our “return.” So we wanted Part I to be us sort of seeping back into the realm of reality from wherever we had been hiding for the last years.


And as you say, in the second part, there’s a bigger presence. I feel at least musically, like here we are, this is us now, this is what we do, but also, there’s a hint of melancholy and nostalgy, because it looks back on things in the past. There are nods to things, styles, musical styles and so on of the past. There’s a touch on nostalgia there definitely which we embrace.


――Who are some of the artists who influenced this project?


Svein Berge: It’s not necessarily specific artists as much as musical genres and styles. So one track, for instance, is a clear nod to the early to mid 80’s Italo disco scene of Europe. And the track “Unity,” as mentioned before, is a clear nod to the UK and sort of mainland Europe rave scene of the early 90s. There is a track in there that is a nod to the sort of early to mid singer-songwriters of the US, the likes of Fleetwood Mac and Neil Young and that kind of thing, but not as country as that. So there’s an odd mix. I think the challenge that we put to ourselves is, can we be able to do all these different things and put them together in one cohesive narrative on Part II, which I think we have managed to pull off to a certain extent at least.





――I think I could hear the singer-songwriter inspiration that you mentioned in “Tell Him” featuring Susanne Sundför.


Svein Berge: Right.


――I really love her voice in your music every time. Do you write the song imagining her singing? Or do you write it first and then decide who’s going to sing it?


Svein Berge: It’s a process that has an artist that we hope for. It’s going to sound a bit sort of mechanical and platonic, but it’s like an instrument. And also, it has to do with the sentiment that someone can bring. Because I don’t know how she manages to do it, but she can really convey that feeling of solitude and sadness and despair and desperation in all that stuff so easily and so wonderfully. So, when writing a track where we want that sentiment, she would be the one to ask. So, yeah, we do write the songs with certain vocalists in mind.





――It’s been six years since your last album and a lot has changed in the music industry in terms of the ways you deliver your music or how you promote via social media. I noticed that you now have an Instagram account.


Torbjørn Brundtland: True. There are many ways to market oneself, and it’s up to the individual artists how hard they want to go in social media [laughs.] And we’ve always felt that if we don’t have anything specific that we want to show the world, we are very low key on social media. We are only visible when we have something that we think is of interest.


Svein Berge: When we grew up as kids, the artists that we favored were the ones that we didn’t know much about. Let’s say Kraftwerk or even anything that had to do with electronic music of the sort of mid to late 80’s through the 90’s, because you only had the information that was on the sleeve of the 12-inch vinyl. So you knew the country of origin and the name of the project and that was it. The rest was up to you to decide what this person was all about. I think that kind of artistry, where the music is the focus and not necessarily the person behind it, that’s something that has always been appealing to us. I think we like the enigma. Anyone that we have ever liked or most of the artists have had that thing in common. They were a bit private, and secretive with their persona.


Torbjørn Brundtland: If you found out what they wanted for dinner, it’s just going to make the whole thing a little bit more down to earth. There’s nothing wrong with that, but as Svein said, we like to keep it mysterious.


Svein Berge: You don’t need to know what David Bowie had for breakfast in order to enjoy his music. It’s better or more interesting to think that he looks like Ziggy whenever he’s moving around. That would be better in my head. I want him to have the lightning bolt on his face.


――It’s amazing how you’ve been working together for so long, ever since you were teenagers. Have you ever imagined that you would be doing this for such a long time when you started?


Svein Berge: Well, personally, I didn’t have a plan to sort of “Let’s do this for 30 years and call it quits on year 31.”


Torbjørn Brundtland: Yeah, the fact that we are doing this still, it’s a little bit baffling. But also, I just feel very grateful to be able to do it. I do remember when Svein and I met up, we used to think about the future a lot. But that was more in like a science fiction, like “Blade Runner” was supposed to take place in 2016. That was a long time away at a time when we were kids. And we used to find out that we were going to be 50 in 2025, and that was so long into the future. I think what the world has become is weirder than what we have become.


――What’s next for you? There is going to be “Profound Mysteries III,” right?


Svein Berge: Well, I think it’s fair to say for anyone who has paid attention to this project, that there are so many hints pointing towards Part III, that there is no point in pretending as if it doesn’t come. There clearly is Part III, which we are really looking forward to unleash [laughs.]


――We are looking forward to it. And we hope to see you in Japan next time!


Svein Berge: We love our Japanese fans and we want to go back to Japan as soon as we can. We have great time and great fun whenever we’re there. So I don’t know what else to say but yeah, we want to go back!


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