Songs and Sonics

While MySpace is often a fantastic place for checking out new music, the Swedish band Testbild! can’t be properly represented within that site’s conventional ADD-friendly structure. Then again, there’s very little about Testbild! that’s conventional. (Yes, there’s an exclamation point at the end of their name, and no, they don’t show their faces in their band photos.)

Testbild!’s latest release, Une Teinte Intense, is an atmospheric concept album about adventurer Isabelle Eberhardt. Sometimes the album sounds like a Middle Eastern Free Design playing lite jazz. (!) At other times it sounds like what might’ve happened if Pink Floyd recorded an alternate soundtrack to Lawrence of Arabia.

But even those far-out comparisons don’t quite describe what Testbild! sounds like or what the band is about. The only thing that can probably be said is that Testbild! doesn’t make background music; this is most definitely art which demands and rewards attention, preferably with a good set of headphones. And there’s some pop thrown in for good measure. If you’re willing to go along for the ride on Une Teinte Intense, the experience is one you won’t soon forget.

Petter Herbertsson is Testbild!’s mastermind, a polite yet slightly mysterious gentleman who prefers the shadows instead of the limelight. And as you’ll see in the following interview, he’s got ideas about art, sound, and making music that differ from the norm. And if you’re as taken with Testbild!’s sound as I am, you might be able to record your own Testbild! album one of these days. What does that mean? Read on. (Studio photos by Moa Andersdotter.)

Petter: Well, the short answer would be that we get inspired by artistic people, or visionaries, who do exactly the opposite of what society expects of them. Further examples would be Chris Marker, William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Bas Jan Ader, Mike Alway, Ferdinand Cheval (the French postman that singlehandedly built a fantasy castle called Palais Idéal in his garden), Delia Derbyshire, etc., etc.

Isabelle Eberhardt was the daughter of Russian nobles, had an anarchistic upbringing in Genève, converted to Islam, and travelled around in North Africa in the early 1900s dressed as a man. She was elected to a mystic Islamic brotherhood called Qadriya, wrote articles for French and Swiss newspapers (but weren’t allowed to return to her home, since she was considered a dangerous and subversive character by the government). And as if that wasn’t enough, she drowned at Aïn Sefra, in the middle of the desert, at the age of 27. Her life was fascinating, as was her personality. She seemed torn between her Islamic religious ideal, and her at some times wild way of life with the cross dressing, lots of alcohol and kif, etc.

And at the same time, she was an artist by definition; her descriptions of the myriads of colours in the North African sunset is totally unique. To make a themetic album about her is simply our way of paying our dues to one of our greatest heroes.

The manifesto said that Testbild! is a band wich doesn’t profess itself to a single musical genre, that one of the main assignments should be to investigate and dwell on the relationship between pop music and sounds that could be described as noise. Total honesty was also a key conception, i.e. the music could never have a commercial purpose, and had to come from our personal musical tastes only. These things are still followed, I guess, but if we were to write a manifesto today, it would be more developed in a way. But also more or less non-existing, depending on points of view.

We strongly believe that it’s an artist’s (artist in a broadened sense) duty to avoid clichés at all cost, to at least try to kill your darlings every now and then, to never underestimate the audience and to create something that is far beyond the music business and the establishment. On the other hand, Testbild! should be a band based on ideas of any kind; in that case you could say that the only rule is that there are no rules.

I started the band ten years ago, because I was fed up with playing with “normal” bands where you were supposed to stick to a genre, wear a certain type of clothes, write prefab songs that people could dance to, etc. Testbild! was supposed to be the antithesis to all that.

Back then, it was just me. Today we are at least eight members, and we’re still growing. I want Testbild! to be around when I’m dead too. I want the project to be immortal. I have suggested to other bands that they could perform as us, and do more or less exactly what they want, but so far no one has dared.

Absolutely. The thing is, confusion is something good in our opinion. You have to keep moving forward all the time to develop as an artist, and as a human being. I may have started the project ten years ago, but at that very moment I had to resign as a leader, since the whole thing was supposed to be idea-based. You can’t have a leader if you want to be a part of something that opposes authorities and the establishment, can you? If some people decide to “kidnap” the idea, and release an album under the same name, playing indie rock in leather jackets and sunglasses, that’s a good thing too, because there is always a small chance that reviewers or journalists eventually will find out that there actually is (or was) another band with exactly the same name, with a totally different approach. And then you have a discussion, a debate on the subjects that we’re interested in.

I’m not saying that there ever will be a debate, but anyway… I know all this sounds terribly pretentious, but that’s something we just have to accept. There used to be at least one band from Sweden calling themselves Testbild, but I’m not sure if they’re around anymore. And I know for a fact that there is a German band with the same name; I think they’re into metal stuff. There’s also a Danish collective, but they’re concentrating on video art. I contacted them about six years ago, and asked them if they thought it was a problem that we had the same name, but they were just amused.

At my place we have Fender Rhodes, piano, electric bass, acoustic guitar, a couple of analogue synths, lute, kantele, vihuela, glockenspiel, banjo, chromatic harmonicas, melodica, violin, oud, hand drums and other percussive instruments. At Douglas’s place there’s lots of guitars (both acoustic and electric) and analogue synths, a vibraphonette and other stuff, and at the rehearsal place there’s a Wurlitzer piano and drums.

We go out on excursions in the city or in the nature where we happen to be, and just record everything we can come up with on our mini disc. We keep these recordings in what you might call sound libraries at home, and whenever we need a special kind of sound, we just look through our files.

We’ve done some odd stuff when it comes to our field recordings. For example, I borrowed a professional microphone from my stepbrother — he’s into filmmaking, so he has incredibly expensive stuff — that was rather long, like a forearm maybe. It had a pink angora cover to protect the recordings from wind sounds, and the handle was shaped like that of a gun. I walked around at the docks in Malmö last year, recording water sounds and sea birds, and people just stared at me like I was some kind of maniac. It was summer and very hot, so imagine a sweaty guy in sunglasses, pointing a pink angora gun at everything!

We’ve also done stuff like breaking into abandoned buildings and attics to capture the inherent sounds. There are recordings of Pontus playing accordion to cows, of Mattias playing a satellite dish with a bow, of me sitting at an old chair and moving backwards and forwards all the time to get a creaking sound, of Siri picking mushrooms in the woods, of fighting cats, etc.

Once I had the idea that every song of mine should contain an element of chance, to get a mystery feel to it. You can hear traces of that on our second album, The Inexplicable Feeling of September, but we abandoned the idea rather quickly, since it tended to limit the possibilities rather than broaden them. It turned out to be just another type of musical straitjacket or uniform that we’ve always tried to run away from. So it’s not a rule anymore. But I think it’s sometimes just a way of reasoning when you compose, like, “Now let’s see, what does this song need after the chorus — an anarchistic noise part maybe?”

I’m also somewhat fascinated with the idea of sound that suddenly stops and changes perspective, like a meta listening. We did that a couple of times on our unreleased “real” second album The Lolita Wagner Case (to be released some time in the near future on Radio Khartoum, it’s the second part of a thematic trillogy starting with The Double Life of Testbild!). First you have a proper song. Then in the second verse, you hear someone putting on a cassette recorder, and the song continues on the tape while you hear the person breathing in the background. There are many more layers than you think. You are listening to a record, but at the same time someone is listening to you, listening to a record, and a person listening to the person who’s listening to you, listening to a record and so forth. Very John Cage indeed!

Oh, thank you! But getting back to song structure: it’s a very delicate matter and should not be taken lightly. The key word is listening, of course. You have to listen carefully to where a melody line or a chord progression wants to go, and then the music actually writes itself. It takes a lot of time and effort, and sometimes you don’t have the patience for it, but when it happens it’s the most wonderful thing. I think you can tell when you’ve been careless about a song, but usually not until after a while.

I’m not ruling anything out, but for my own part I’m through with writing conventional songs. I’ve done that so much in the past. I guess you can see that as part of a learning process. And I should stress that it does of course happen that we write conventional stuff every now and then, but these songs are always thrown away. I don’t see the point in keeping something anybody could do; you should listen to your own inner voice instead.

Oh you know, just fooling around with EQ to get that old, fractured sound. There was also a great deal of voice direction; the way that Katja was supposed to read the text was in a kind of slow and half whispery tone to strengthen the dream-like atmosphere.

It depends on the circumstances. I personally have an indestructible passion for great songwriters, i.e. musicians that really treat the song like the work of art it is, people like Louis Philippe, Brian Wilson, Laura Nyro, Paddy McAloon, George Gershwin or Dorothy Ashby, people who are in love with the songs they write. I want to become one of them myself, and I hope that maybe I will some day.

On the other hand, I get obsessed with artistic ideas all the time, and perhaps it’s easier to find those in movies than in music, I don’t know. I love directors like Andrei Tarkovsky and Victor Erice; they have the aesthetics and a poetic attitude that’s very close to my own, describing the beauty, the mystery and eternal sadness of the world and its inhabitants.

When I get obsessed with something, I have to find out everything there is about it. My latest infatuation is French film maker Chris Marker, who is mostly known for a short low budget science fiction movie from the early sixties called La Jetée, entirelly composed of black and white stills. Apparently Terry Gilliam was very influenced by this when he wrote Twelve Monkeys, with all its time travel business. But La Jetée is something completely different, of course.

Sans Soleil, a full length movie from 1983 that is a unique and puzzling mix of documentary footage, apocalyptic science fiction, meditations on what memory is, and a highly intellectual and essay-like voiceover, is even better. Chris Marker (it is said that he took his name from a Marker pen) is an enigmatic character who’s been around the business since the fifties. He rarely gives interviews and almost never shows his face. The images of him that exist has him most of the time standing behind a camera, and nowadays he’s been known to send pictures of his cat Guillaume to journalists who contact him.

You’ve obviously taken a Residents-like approach to band photos, yet — correct me if I’m wrong — that’s your face singing in Testbild’s “ENIAC vs. UNIVAC” video. So the cat’s out of the bag, at least as far what you look like. Why bother hiding now?

First of all: that’s not me in the video, it’s a friend of director Angelique Clark. I don’t remember his name, but I think Alexander Bailey (of our American record company Radio Khartoum) mentioned that he actually is Scandinavian, and I guess he was chosen to play the part because he looked like our friend Magnus Löfgren (the guy impersonating ENIAC and UNIVAC on the cover of the first album).

You won’t find any pictures of me anywhere, not of the band with uncovered faces either, and there are no pictures of the whole band together. On the other hand, there are images of several of the other members out there (most of them have other musical projects on the side), so I guess you could cut them out and make little Testbild! collages of your own…

We chose to have it this way for many reasons; one is to emphasize the fact that it’s all idea-based, and that no member is more important than the other. In our modern society, you tend to put focus on the artist rather than his or her work, which is a rather twisted way of looking at things. So that’s of course something we want to protest against. The fact that we sometimes use anagrams instead of our real names is another manifestation of these thoughts.

We have an album coming up in September, it’s called Aquatint, and will hopefully be our most conceptual piece yet. Apart from the music and lyrics, there’ll be a movie and a short story. And if everything goes as planned, the nice digipak will smell of tar.

Well, apparently we have to do it ourselves by hand, so it all depends on if we get the CD’s before they’re sent out to the shops or not, I’m not sure about these things.

Anyway, we’re still working with Bed Stilt, our orchestral and apocalyptic third part of the trillogy I mentioned earlier, an album about Belka and Strelka (the two Russian space dogs from the sixties that actually came back alive) and other things. Oh, and we’re supposed to go on a small tour in Sweden and Denmark in August. We like to keep busy!

The seaside. Everything about it really, water, boats, lighthouses, sand, shaped rocks, fishes, the horizon, the smells and sounds.

Rain. The sound the raindrops make, and just the plain fact that there’s actually water coming down from the sky.

Coloured lamps hung in the trees on summer evenings (is it called Chinese lanterns in English?).

Shortwave radio. I can sit and turn the knob backwards and forwards for hours, the sound has a completely absorbing effect on me.

Used copies of The National Geographic Magazine, preferably from the sixties and seventies. Older copies is OK as well, but never newer.

Foxes. Red foxes, that is. It’s been my favourite animal since I was a child, and I used to dream of them all the time when I was in my early twenties, I even dreamt that I had this fox alter ego, called Kani. I guess you could call the fox my totem if you’re into new age mumbo jumbo stuff (god knows I’m not).

The night sky and the stars.

Dreams. I find it eternally fascinating that ones subconscious is crammed with poetic images and abstract art. I used to have this dream diary where I wrote down everything; many passages in the lyrics and stories are taken from there. I’ve been neglectful to it lately though, maybe I should start again.

Old libraries and dusty archives. I’m a librarian by profession, and have always loved the somewhat archetypal idea of a forgotten, hidden room somewhere in the basement of a public building, stuffed with old books and files with subversive information.

Tea. Preferably Lapsang Souchong or Russian Earl Grey.

Testbild’s web site | Testbild’s MySpace page | Buy “Une Teinte Intense” from Friendly Noise (Sweden) | Buy “Une Teinte Intense” from Amazon