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Flurry of activityNoted producers dig themselves
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by ERIK LEIJON The last time Swedish-American electronic pop trio Miike Snow were in Montreal, frontman Andrew Wyatt was seen in public wearing a midriff-exposing garbage bag. Given the context, performing on an intermittently rainy Sunday afternoon at Osheaga to a moistened and courageously dedicated audience, the bemused Brooklynite could be excused for his brief fashion faux-pas. “I saw it on YouTube later and I liked it when I was sitting at the piano, but when I stood up, it was all too Village People,” opines the furious multitasker, who this year also released an anthemic rock record as the frontman of another group, Fires of Rome. “If I had to do it again, I would have used a bigger bag.” One thing Wyatt and his Swedish bandmates, Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg, couldn’t possibly regret about their wet Montreal debut was their success in translating their dense, atmospheric Scandinavian ice pop to a live setting without losing any of their eponymous debut’s studio wizardry. Despite Karlsson and Winnberg’s reputation for creating some of pop music’s most inventive and leftfield sonic labyrinths as famed songwriting and production duo Bloodshy & Avant (they were responsible for the likes of Britney Spears’ “Toxic”), Miike Snow represents a chance to slow things down with more melancholic nuances. They also get to leave the confines of the studio and play with a large backing band and an array of synths. Karlsson and Winnberg started collaborating together in 2000, meeting Wyatt four years later. When they originally decided to start jamming as a threesome in 2007, there wasn’t any concerted plan to become an actual touring band, but they have now found themselves putting aside their usually long to-do lists in order to concentrate on Miike Snow full-time. Wyatt, also a producer, did consider the opportunity for the three of them to write for themselves to be a breath of fresh air. “It’s not that you don’t try to do something special with someone else,” he says. “It’s just that there are some lines that you don’t cross when you’re at someone else’s party. There were some more liberties we were able to take.” WITH JACK PEÑATE AT PETIT CAMPUS |
