by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“Sometimes it’s very chaotic being in Under Byen,” says Nils Gröndahl, violinist and saw player with the Danish octet. “Chaotic” is an adjective he drops several times during our interview, but it’s one that has little to do with the band’s music, despite the godspeed comparisons you may have heard.

There’s emotive weight in their sometimes primal, earthy rhythms and riffs, not to mention vocals in the key of Björk, but their chamber rock sound is too organized to evoke chaos. Working with moods that suggest serenity and brooding, and arrangements that almost always stay spry, Under Byen have achieved a yin-yang balance described in their bio as “a spike heel for one foot and a military boot for the other.”

It doesn’t make for a smooth stride, but it’s miles from chaos. If there’s anything unwieldy about Under Byen, it’s the trajectory of their career. In July, the band became the first non-Canadian act on Toronto’s Paper Bag Records, home to the likes of Stars and controller.controller. The label’s A&R man Trevor Larocque signed them on the strength of their set at the Spot Festival in Aarhus, where the band is based. Also in attendance were Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber and Rolling Stone old-boy David Fricke. Fricke discovered Under Byen in 2002, when the magazine deemed them a “band to watch.” He heightened his acclaim by introducing them at the following year’s Spot, saying, “Welcome to the best band in Denmark, probably the best band in the world.”

Notes from underground

By that point, the band had more than paid their dues, half-working in obscurity since their start in 1995. Their name (pronounced “oh-nah boon,” means “under the city”) reflects their status in the Danish music scene, at least until the release of their award-winning debut album, Kyst (“coast”) in 1999.

“The first few years, we were not really that focused on what we were doing, which way we should go with it, and we played very few concerts,” says Gröndahl.

Drummer/vocalist Stine Sørensen attributes their lack of gigs to the dearth of venues in Denmark. “It’s very hard to get in there,” she says, “and this is a large band with many people, so it was sometimes difficult on very small [stages] to have room for the equipment.”

According to singer Henriette Sennenvaldt, quoted on an Under Byen fansite, an early show in 1997 took place on “the smallest stage in the world and we stood there embarrassing ourselves while some yelled ‘pussy’ and half of the audience left.”

“The first tour, after the first record in ’99, that was kind of an eye-opener,” recalls Gröndahl. “To suddenly be in rock clubs, to find out how we could play this as rock music, it was totally different. We realized that we had to form this into something different live. We all had a really strong feeling that suddenly we grew together as a band. It was quite an experience, actually. I’ve been feeding on that ever since.”

Language policy

With a population of 5.5 million, where a gold record signifies 20,000 sales (as opposed to 50,000 in Canada, or 500,000 in the USA), Denmark is a very limited market, which is why English has become the lingua franca for Danish singers. Under Byen, co-founded by Sennenvaldt and former band member Katrine Stochholm, chose to sing in their native tongue, not because of national pride (or nationalism), but because Sennenvaldt’s English didn’t cut it, at least not enough to properly convey her poetry in a second language. But, as with Iceland’s Sigur Rós, the sheer musicality of her vocals is easy to appreciate, even without making sense of the lyrics. (English translations of their older songs are available at www.larsdideriksen.com/underbyen/lyrics.htm, and the band is working on a booklet of new translations, which may or may not be ready to distribute during their brief North American tour.)

A read through the translations reveals a tonal unity between the words and the music, with frequent lyrical juxtapositions of natural beauty and negative emotion, which make the vocals all the more easy on foreign ears.

“They connect very strongly,” says Sørensen. “The lyrics are the starting point—we create the music out of atmosphere in the words.”

Ironically, Under Byen have managed to make a mark in many Western countries—critically, if not yet commercially, and with support from radio stations such as BBC—but there’ve been no props from their Scandinavian neighbours, who are usually the first foreigners to embrace Danish bands, due to common linguistic ground.

“It’s kind of funny,” says Gröndahl. “In Sweden, they don’t consider Denmark as being a country that could provide music that they want to listen to, with good reason—there’s really a lot of bad music in Denmark. We sell some records in Norway. But when we started playing our first concerts in Germany, we realized it could work in other countries.”

Fabric villes

Under Byen’s entire discography, including singles, soundtrack work, remixes and their albums Kyst and 2002’s Det er mig der holder træerne sammen, were recorded in Aarhus, but in planning the production of their third LP, the band felt it was time to leave the nest.

“We were trying to get away from our hometown,” Gröndahl admits. They considered countries on opposite ends of the world, in completely disparate climates—Sørensen says that maybe next time they’ll realize their dream of taking up the ukulele and making an album in Hawaii. Instead, they went into pre-production in an 18th century house in Brussels and recorded the album in a studio tucked into an “empty and silent” forest in northern Sweden.

“It’s not like we had to go somewhere, but we wanted to, for the story,” Sørensen says. “It was only afterwards that it occurred to us how big a deal it was. It was a place completely different from where we live, so we all felt very enthusiastic about [the natural element]. We wanted it to have an impact on us and on the album, so we tried to live out the story.”

The band’s primary goal in making Samme Stof Som Stof (“same fabric as fabric”) was to record live off the floor, with everyone in the same room making equal contributions to the sessions.

At their sides were British laptop folk artist Leafcutter John, whose role lay somewhere between teacher, mediator and motivator, though he dubbed himself “distracter.” Otherwise self-produced, and mixed by New York’s Kevin Salem (Yo La Tengo, Giant Sand) and Danish pop producer Carsten Heller, the record achieves an organic immediacy, free of pretension and packed with feeling. Montrealers will soon find out whether it lives up to their internationally renowned live show—the album is out in stores as of last week, and they play two shows during the Pop Montreal festival.

“It’s sometimes stronger live,” says Sørensen, comparing their recorded sound with the torrent they reputedly unleash at gigs, a huge leap from their early on-stage chaos. “Now we play on the smaller scenes and it works—we have very good sound engineer who’s always with us, for protection. That’s why we dare to play more weird places or different kinds of places. But the volume in itself, and the dynamics that we can work with, you can never do that in a studio, regardless of the way we recorded this album, to seek that live energy. But we know that there’s always something very important happening to us, and between us, while we’re playing, no matter where.”

With Joanna Newsom and Joe Grass at Ukrainian Federation tonight, Thursday, Oct. 5, 9 p.m., and with Giant Sand and Mike O’Brien at Cabaret Juste Pour Rire on Saturday, Oct. 7, 8 p.m., $20

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