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SPLEEN UNITED BIOGRAPHY:

It takes a strong musical vision and a solid band to produce the kind of cohesive, stylistically certain debut album that Spleen United has released in Godspeed into the Mainstream. But Spleen United is a band that has also taken the time it takes to create their own unique sound and style.

With an underlying tone of warm romanticism and a musical approach that can be down and dirty, hard rocking, melodious and experimental, Spleen United sounds like no other band in Denmark today. They have replaced bass and guitar with synthesizers on many of the tracks, and they insist on playing synthesizers as if they were guitars, to lend an organic feel to the electronic aspects of the album. In other words, Spleen United take their own unique approach to music, and this puts them in a class of their own, right from this debut album.

Spleen United consists of the brothers Bjarke and Gaute Niemann, Jens Kinch, Kasper Nørlund and Rune Wehner. This constellation of musicians did not get together in the course of a week or even a year. Like everything else in the Spleen United universe, finding the right combination was a process that took several years. The Niemann brothers grew up in the town of Jelling. Bjarke and drummer Jens Kinch became musical playmates in the first grade. Kasper Nørlund entered the picture in high school, and Rune Wehner did not join the band until the others had moved to the city of Århus.

Before Spleen United became Spleen United, the band members played everything from pop to heavy rock in innumerable bands and other musical contexts. “We tried a bit of everything, until we finally realised that a somewhat darker mood was what worked best for us. It was also the coolest music to play!” Since the band members have known each other for so many years and played together under different names for almost as long, it’s difficult to pin down exactly when Spleen United was born. “The advantage we have over other bands is that we’ve always done our experimenting behind closed doors. We never played any really serious concerts until we’d been playing together for a long time. We must have practiced for a year and a half before we even thought about playing a concert. We had all tried playing in situations that didn’t turn out to be so great, so we wanted to deliver something we believed in 100% when we finally hit the stage,” the band says.

Around the time of the Spot 09 festival in 2003, Spleen United felt that the time had finally arrived when their music was ready to be performed for a live audience. They had taken some initial steps in that direction six months earlier, playing a concert at Musikcafeen in Århus under another name. “That was about seeing if the songs we’d been working on for a year and a half behind closed doors were strong enough to perform for an audience. As it turned out, they weren’t, so we returned to the practice room and didn’t perform live again until 2003.”

When Spleen United describe how they work with music; how Bjarke comes up with ten-minute sketches at home, and that the band then works on these together in the practice room – often taking several years to put them in their final form – it’s hard to avoid getting the impression that they are perfectionists. But they don’t entirely agree: “It’s just ordinary self-criticism. You have to be self-critical if you care at all about quality.”

Spleen United started out playing guitar-based music. The instrumentation was classic – bass, drums and guitars – and the musical tone fairly light. However, the band’s palette darkened when one of the members happened to buy a synthesizer “because we thought it could be cool to include that”. As time went on, more and more synthesizers were added, as the band discovered that abandoning the limitations of classic rock-band instrumentation enabled them to create new sonic imagery and moods. “We knew right from the start, however, that we didn’t want to work with sequencing. We really take pride in playing everything ourselves.”

Four members of Spleen United started out as guitarists and thus had no prior experience with synthesizers. “Just like when you get your first guitar, it sounds terrible for a long time. But none of us have much money, so we can’t just go out and buy new instruments all the time. We have to use the ones we have and make the most of them.”

Spleen United feel that their music “builds self-confidence” because “there’s quite a bit of power in it.” And indeed, it is an imposing, emotionally compelling record. It’s an album with a lot of pathos, created by a band that dares consistently to express themselves seriously, without reaching for disarming self-irony. Godspeed into the Mainstream was produced by Carsten Heller (whose production credits also include Danish success band Nephew) and features nine songs that resulted from a long process of selection. “We’ve discarded loads of ideas. People might think of the record as very coherent in its style, but we think it’s quite wide-ranging. There are hard things, sensitive things and blunt things. We hope that the more you listen to the record, the more nuances you’ll discover. Some people might think that we take ourselves a bit too seriously, but if you want to accomplish anything with your music, you have to go all the way.”

APPLESEED CAST "PEREGRINE"

to be released through Racing Junior on March 27th 2006.

We’re excited to announce we will release Appleseed Cast’s seventh album “Peregrine” on March 27th. After several years absence, and rumours of a break-up, they return with a new line-up, and a new album produced by John Congleton (Explosions in the Sky, The Roots, Modest Mouse). They will soon tour Europe, including three shows in Norway.