Throughout your life there are certain albums and musicians that really strike you as different, special, otherworldly even. They mold and shape you and at the most extreme they might make you reconsider your whole way of life. The albums I’m featuring in this series of articles are the ones that did something like that to me, or at least the most prominent ones.
Being a non-religious person, these albums are probably the closest thing to a religion in my life. Some believe in God, some believe in Buddha, some even believe L. Ron Hubbard. I Believe in Magnus Moriarty™.
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.