AK-Momo: London + Stockholm = N.Y.
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Amplifier, May-June
2005
“This band is
remarkably easy
to be in. No endless rehearsals. Very few arguments,” says keyboardist
Mattias
Olsson about AK-MOMO, the duo he formed with vocalist Anna Karin von
Malmborg
after the two met as a result of “timing and drunkenness” last summer.
That
user-friendliness might be unavoidable. After all, it’s hard to lock
horns, and
expensive to waste time, when you and your partner live in separate
countries
entirely.
With von Malmborg
in London
doing video art and Olsson running Roth Händle Studios in Stockholm,
the two musicians managed to cobble together the time to record Return To N.Y. (Hidden Agenda), which
generates some of the noirish feel of Portishead and Massive Attack
while
eschewing their hard trip-hop beats. The songs have much more subdued
rhythm
tracks that rumble underneath the surface instead of urging the song
forward.
“It was very conscious not to add emphasis on rhythm,” says Olsson. “I
also
wanted to see what it felt like to be in that sound environment for 40
minutes
or so.”
It’s an environment
to which Olsson
refers as “a mood-heavy atmosphere with the seductive voice of AK von
Malmborg
leading the way through murky hotel lobbies, fog-ridden streets and
back alleys
of places you don’t fall asleep in.” To achieve that sound, AK-MOMO
relied almost
entirely on outdated keyboard instruments such as mellotron, optigan
and
orchestron. While most fans of popular music over the last 40 years are
familiar with the former – or at least know enough to nod thoughtfully
whenever
they hear the word – the latter two, which use optical discs rather
than tape
loops to generate their sounds, evaded popular notice.
Olsson talks about
the
machines with the excitement of a true believer. “It would have been
the
easiest thing in the world to have some stupid scratchy drum loop
underneath,
but then it would just feel like samples of stuff. I wanted to show how
these
amazing instruments could be the basis of an album or a song and not
just the cool
token crazy overdub.” It was the challenges associated with the
keyboards’
technical limitations that appealed to Ollson, who started out as a
classical
percussionist and drummed in an experimental rock band. “My idea has
always
been to merge pop songs with some kind of more noise-oriented
background,” he
says. “I am still ripping off stuff from Genesis’s The
Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.”