music to eat and lie down to
I have known Jesper Siberg since the late 80s, when he and Lykke Strunk moved to London for a few years. Henrik Balling of Gangway had introduced us. Jesper rented part of my studio in Berwick Street when I first moved out of the basement in St Anne's Court.
He was already a special breed. He could spend hours and hours, long into the night, making sounds for his synthesisers. He's really good at it, a fact recognised by Yamaha and Turnkey. I brought him in on several projects I was producing at the time.
Wind forward to winter 2005. Back in Copenhagen for several years. Jesper phoned and said he thought he could get a little funding for a project from DPA (the Danish Songwriters' Guild he belongs to), and was I interested in making an album together? Sure, why not? It fired me up and got me writing. What came out was a form of electronica with some occasional strings. A kind of Neo-Classical Electronica. Ambient Classical Trip Hop? "Music to eat and lie down to" was the working title for the album which, needless to say, stuck.
We both wrote some tracks separately, then Jesper came to London for a week and we wrote four new ones together, flat earth, agura, instamaticlucky 13 and a track called submerged (which should be on the second album...). Then in August 2006, I went to Copenhagen and we wrote two more, rainy day and norreport. Finally another week in London late in 2006 nailed (almost) all the remaining mixes, edits and tweaks. While Jesper was tweaking his last mix of prossima espresso, I started playing around with a loop he'd generated. In two hours, most of heaven was in place. The rest was by email. Jesper did a dub of the drums which I then chopped around and inserted into the track.
Along the way we decided it would be best to maintain control of everything and release it ourselves using the NCB funding just for manufacturing.
The hardest part was getting a running order we both liked. It was time to call in a higher authority in the form of our friend Torben Johansen, formerly of Gangway, now A+R at SonyBMG in Denmark. He came up with a totally surprising sequence which blew us away.
Jesper's colleague from 80s band Scatterbrain Hilmer Hassig did the Mastering. Designer Jonathan Barnbrook's Japanese intern Shingo Noma did the sleeve. The package was complete. We are both really happy with it. There's something pure and undiluted about making every decision ourselves.