Diskjokke
First full length album from Diskjokke, the new shining light of the scene known as Oslodisco. “Staying in” was released this week to great reviews.
An apprentice of such names as Hans-Petter Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas and Rune Linbæk Diskjokke, aka Joachim Dyrdahl, has taken the trademark “humane” Oslo disco one step further by creating what critics – all delighted - have called “fire-place house.”
“Staying in,” the title of the album, might be read as an allusion to exactly this: you no longer need to go clubbing to enjoy house music and disco. Diskjokke has made a record that in the words of the Norwegian daily Dagbladet’s critic “combines club and cocoa.” Others have called the music a “soft electronic hammock.”
Diskjokke, 28-years-old, has played the violin since the age of five and spun discs since fourteen. During university math-studies in Trondheim he started hosting club concepts, and then he was discovered in earnest by Prins Thomas after relocating in Oslo.
But it is Lindstrøm who has been Diskjokke’s main inspiration, he relates, by demonstrating how catchy disco melodies and old-school sense of tune-craft could be fused with cold electronic elements and beats.
Diskjokke first made his name known in Oslo through the Sunkissed club concept and the compilation records released under that name by Smalltown Supersound, the same label that has now released “Staying in.” Sunkissed has made quite a stir internationally the past few years, and now the gates are open for Diskjokke, who has become something of a darling of the zeitgeisty musical establishment in Oslo, as well as the media.
-I always build the music on the basis of dancing and danceability, says Diskjokke, and my focus and drive has always been the live club context. But when I think the songs become too cold and sterile, melodies start popping-up.
The result is very soft and cosy; perfect for not going out at all. It is an innovation, no less, in the field of house-disco-trance. In his own words it’s “trance, only not.”
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