Amerika

We, the nearly indescribable indie duo Lilou & John, have released our fourth full length album Guerilla Poetry.

Long gone is the electro pop and EDM of recent albums. We are turning in a completely new direction: a gritty, filthy noise and cheap playful production. We decided not to clean the tracks from minor distortions, clicks, buzzes, dissonances and pops but include them as part of the track. We also decided not to record any song more than three times to keep them raw and authentic.

Anyone familiar with our music will recognise the vocals, but we decided to increase the turmoil of the arrangements. We strove for maximum energy and emotional momentum and almost zero technique.

These decisions derived from a feeling that recording and releasing music had become less fun. We are blunt and disorderly, and do not want to be anything else in our music. It was also necessary for us to start recording side by side, because we live side by side in an intimate and dynamic relationship and wanted to carry that with us through the whole creative process.

We have kept the number of instruments down. There is of course Lilou’s infamous galdr, but on Guerilla Poetry we combined it with an electric bass guitar and an electric guitar. We added a minimum of effects such as distortion to the vocals and the instruments.

For preparation, Lilou only read the first verse and the chorus of all songs, enough for her to make a melody. After that we began recording. The whole point of that was to keep the song clean from boredom by repetition. Each time a poem is read, the reader automatically creates a pattern of how it should be read. We wanted to avoid that to keep the creativity free. Many songs were therefore recorded as first or second-time encounters.

The instruments were also added with a minimum of recordings to avoid a clean sound and stop any form of perfectionism. To begin with it was hard to stop ourselves but with each song we improved.

We also decided to allow free structure of the vocal performance, in other words we did not necessarily need each verse to be equal in length or even the distance between verses to have the same number of beats. The songs were made as a descent into creative chaos for the listener who wish to to escape the excruciating comfort and control of the therapeutical state and its over-socialisation.

Lilou sang from the heart without any attempt to fit into the structure of the song, and John jammed along to accompany the vocals. For example, some of the songs intentionally lack a clearly defined start or end.

Each poem is dealing with its own topic, each one written to drag the listener through a power process, to encourage him to dive deep into his own primal fluid of fear and discover its relentless force. For that to happen we believe the music must be original in the most brutal way and evoke all emotional states of mind. This is no different from our former albums but on Guerilla Poetry we have taken this dive to its extreme.

In this we have continued writing our highly personal style of poetry originating in our journey to recover from lifelong progressive humanism. Each of our albums have explored different parts of this journey and Guerilla Poetry is perhaps best understood as the chapter of accepting detachment from human self-deceit as a part of a healthy life.

It is therefore also a journey back to the early forms of poetic expression as mythology and magical enchantments in pagan societies, where the origin of art itself is.

As a side note, in 2016 we released our first album but did not know how to take the dive ourselves. We relied on external producers and a creative process that was too rigid to let us break free. We had demo tapes of songs, recorded on a cell phone, that captured the sound but we had no idea how to reproduce them in a studio.

As such, Guerilla Poetry is our first release where we to 100% create the sound we originally wanted to put on our albums. All we had to do was to leave behind the entire idea of recording in a studio or even try to produce a clean sound.

Welcome to our creative chaos. Please follow us on the streaming service of your choice. You can hear Guerrilla Poetry on Spotify. If you look carefully you may even find our first almost happy song since we released “Salvini Pop” in 2019. Enjoy!

Lilou & John

Tags: artwave, indie rock, lilou & john