Casa Murilo is an up and coming Oslo-based band led by two english lads; Chris Winfield and Dan Hesketh. I caught their gig at Mono the other day and was really impressed.
They’re great live, but they’re also quite good on record. I reviewed their EP a few days ago. The full EP is even free to listen to on their myspace page.
I recently met with Chris and Dan at a local café to ask them some questions about Brazil, the EP and the future.
Now We’ve Got Members, concidered to be the flagship of the small Oslo-based CD/CD-R label, Metronomicon Audio, are celebrating ten years as a band by playing through big parts of their catalogue, starting at the beginning, before they’ll release a new album titled Repulsive Force sometime this fall.
In the beginning, the band didn’t have any members at all. Today, the band has ten members, and in some live situations they’re augmented by additional musicians, forming an ensemble of as many as fifteen members. They describe their music as a mixture of musical styles from near and distant hemispheres, all relative to which hemisphere the listener might be situated. The sound has elements of both balkan folk music and arabian funk, as well as progressive rock (without the rock), disco (without the mirrorballs) and free jazz (without the jazz) and it’s all neatly merged together in their complex yet hummable pop tunes.
No, this is not Pippi Longstocking’s monkey, but a band with the same name.
It all started a few years ago when I went in to a store that sells used CD’s. Flipping through shelf after shelf filled with CDs, I had no idea what I was looking for, but that’s when I saw it; an album called Downhill Thrill by some band named Herr Nilsson (or Mister Nilsson, if you will). I had barely heard about them, All I knew was that they’re from Bergen. Despite not knowing remotely what they sounded like, I just knew that I had to buy this album. That’s not something I would live to regret.