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The final notes of Todd Terje's debut album are of a festival crowd chanting the melody to his 2012 track Inspector Norse, as if it were Seven Nation Army or any other swaggering rock refrain. But Inspector Norse is actually a charming, even rather fey instrumental disco number; one that has united various strands of club culture: deep house aficionados, disco dads, hipster wallflowers and people who just appreciate a good tune. It was the breakthrough moment not just for Terje, but for a whole Scandinavian 'cosmic' disco scene that had been quietly flourishing under the radar, populated not by your typical Wayfarer-clad Ibiza party-boys but by hirsute Vikings apparently fresh from being birch-whipped outside a sauna. And when I meet Terje in his Oslo studio, he couldn't look more Norwegian: a big beard blooms happily out of his face, and he speaks English with polite perfection, like someone laying down Scrabble tiles.
He explains how a trombone-playing Brand New Heavies kid got into dance music. "My older sister brought home some Dutch dance, 2Unlimited, stuff like that," he says. "I was really excited by those sounds: they were really fast, energetic. All the covers would have stupid 90s drawings, all these babes in neon colours, and I thought: 'Wow, shit, I want to be a part of this.'" He studied the Prodigy, trying to work out how their beats were made, but ultimately he concedes, "I don't think a 13-year-old kid can be funky." The Damascene moment came when his sister brought back Sexy Disco from university, a track by Bergen producer Bjørn Torske. "That was the first time I listened to disco in a non-ironic way," he says. Thanks to nights like Sunkissed, and producers such as Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas both of whom have studios adjacent to Terje's the Norwegian disco scene became one of the signature voices in European dance.
by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian
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