120 Days- Osaka by JasiJasi

I neve got around to checking out Norwegian electronic/dance band 120 Days when they came through in 2008 (for show at the Merc) but I gave a listen to the first track off the band's sophomore disc (120 Days II) and got pulled in by the band's teutonic New Order meets Kraftwork sound. The band just released the first single from this upcoming disc, "Osaka", as a free download and this track is also the first release on Club Mod, a new singles imprint by Modular and both Sidwho? and Diskjokke remixed it.

If a year is a long time in politics, five years in music can be a career. The fact that 120 Days have taken half a decade to deliver the follow up to their debut album might have counted against them, especially in a world where things have never seemed more ephemeral, even more so since they flippantly admit that they spent as much time “lucid dreaming and partying” as they did “recording and touring”. But there’s no point making a record when you’re not ready, as any band forced to return to the studio prematurely will tell you. The old adage about having a lifetime to make your first record and only a few months to make the second is based upon truth, and 120 Days will testify to that, having entirely scrapped their original follow up. They had good reason: by the time they’d concluded the heavy touring that followed the late 2006 release of their self-titled debut, they were, quite simply, “sick of seeing each other’s faces”.

120 Days II is darker, dirtier, fiercer and sharper than the band's debut disc. The roots of their new, advanced level of savagery are varied: time spent working with other artists, including Serena Maneesh, Bygdin and Masselys, have undoubtedly broadened their horizons, and their equally broadened tastes in music have no doubt done wonders for their writing. Alongside Kraftwerk, Joy Divison, Neu!, The Cure and Primal Scream – XTRMNTR-era, naturally – new influences have come into play: “the hard minimalist industrial sound of Detroit Techno, the transcendental drone jazz of (early) Alice Coltrane, and the over-the-top orchestral maximalism of Wagnerian opera,” they claim rather magnificently. “When we recorded our debut, we were very much into minimalism, and a ‘changing chords is for pussies’ dogma. In the first years after we released it, we went even further in that direction, so, in a way, you could say that the scrapped sessions were our minimalist peak, and after that we started playing around with song structure again. 120 Days 2.0 sometimes likes listening to the Carpenters. We would never admit that before!”



120 Days are: Jonas Dahl, Kjetil Ovesen, Arne Kvalvik, Ådne Meisfjord

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120 Days