120 Days had its first rehearsal in autumn of 2001 in their small hometown, Kristiansund, on the northwest coast of Norway. The band consisted of the four 19 year old friends Jonas Dahl, Arne Kvalvik, Kjetil Ovesen and Ådne Meisfjord. They called themselves The Beautiful People. Not much could happen in Kristiansund, where the bars are full of cover bands if they played music at all. They would have to move to Oslo to be on the map. Yet with Oslo having recently been rated the most expensive city on earth, they knew they wouldn't be able to afford a place to live. So they found the perfect solution: they bought a used motor home, drove to Oslo, parked it in the street, and lived and played in it for a year. Read More...
120 Days had its first rehearsal in autumn of 2001 in their small hometown, Kristiansund, on the northwest coast of Norway. The band consisted of the four 19 year old friends Jonas Dahl, Arne Kvalvik, Kjetil Ovesen and Ådne Meisfjord. They called themselves The Beautiful People. Not much could happen in Kristiansund, where the bars are full of cover bands if they played music at all. They would have to move to Oslo to be on the map. Yet with Oslo having recently been rated the most expensive city on earth, they knew they wouldn’t be able to afford a place to live. So they found the perfect solution: they bought a used motor home, drove to Oslo, parked it in the street, and lived and played in it for a year.
In these intense months the only thing they did was rehearse. But junkies constantly trying to break in got to be too much. With the help of earnings from various jobs, they finally left the motor home. By this time the 120 Days sound was created.
It’s a sound heralding a new dawn of electronic rock: built by vintage and discarded keyboards, colored by drones and noise, powered by guitars, and propelled, in lieu of a drummer, by a motorik beat synched with Kraftwerk and NEU! Other touchstones and inspirations include Suicide, Stereolab, Spaceman 3, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, Steve Reich’s Four Organs, Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR, The Stooges, New Order and Harmonia. The songs describe the desolation of cold, dark, long Oslo nights spent searching for escape, a hand to hold, or one last fix.
Early in 2004 the band released their critically acclaimed 3-song EP titled Sedated Times on the small Oslo label Public Demand Records. Late in 2004 they released their second EP, 5 tracks that caused quite a stir in Norway. And after the bands gig at By:Larm in Norway (the Norwegian equivalent to South By Southwest) the band sent shockwaves through a lot of industry people, and the gig resulted in the band being booked to both the Reading and Leeds Festivals in England and the SONAR Festival in Barcelona. Very soon the band had found a home with the great label Smalltown Supersound (Jaga Jazzist, Lindstrom, Kim Hiorthoy) for Norway, and with VICE Records in North America. With their signing to VICE they become the first Norwegian band ever to be signed directly to a US label.
Their self-titled debut album was produced by the band themselves and recorded in Oslo’s Crystal Canyon studios in January and February 2006. The album was mixed by Jorgen Traeen and the band in Duper Studio, Bergen, in April 2006.
Very few bands release really remarkable debut singles, and very few Norwegian bands manage to excite parts of the international music intelligentsia. With Sedated Times, young Oslo-based quartet 120 Days, then known as the Beautiful People, managed both. Their sound is both original and modern enough to fit in with the so-called “new rock” of the early 2000s. Their use of a drum machine and Kraftwerk-esque analogue synthesizers rather than guitars sets them apart from most of the leading international neo-rock bands. But there’s a certain desperate-yet-tuneful tone to singer Ådne Meisfjord’s distorted voice that made several critics rightfully compare him with a young Iggy Pop and Julian Casablancas of the Strokes. This is powerful stuff from a band that undoubtedly has a great recording future ahead of it.
