After recently landing a major ad campaign for Sprint in the States (didn’t a similar situation propel Royksopp into the stratosphere?) and on the cusp of releasing their first full-length LP, Detektivbyrån are starting to garner some well-deserved attention with their carnivalesque renditions of folk instrumentation.

Following up their ‘06 EP release called Hemvagen EP on Danarkia, Detektivbyrån are forging ahead, describing themselves as “honest as it’s possible to be nowadays. Detektivbyrån is simply Music All Inclusive.”

Comprised of Jon Ekstrom, Anders Flanders and Martin Molin, this Gothenburg based trio can be best thought of as electroacoustic (whatever that means…) as they combine vibes, accordion, trumpet, guitars, drum machines and synths to generate the Detektivbyrån sound.
Fly’s Jeremy Balius found Martin holed up in the studio and queried a few truths and had some good laughs.

“I get inspiration and influences from: snowboarding, building stuff, sewing, 60s cowboy books about “Bill & Ben”, Harry Potter (both the movies and the books), instruments, building instruments, astronomy and theoretical physics.”

For the non-Scandinavians, can you please elaborate on your name Detektivbyrån?
If you translate Detektivbyrån to English it means The Detective Agency. The number one reason that made us stick to this name once we’d discovered it was that it was playful and funny in a good way. People laughed when we told them our band name and that’s great. The idea came from a style of music that we’ve always called “Spy-Rock”. “Spy-Rock”, as far as I am concerned, doesn’t sound at all like us but it’s instrumental music just like ours.

There has been some talk about how your music draws comparisons with Yann Tiersen’s scores for Amelie and Goodbye Berlin. Now that you have had a song featured on the Sprint ad in the States, could you see yourself working with film?
Absolutely. We are talking about doing that right now, it would be so fun.

How did you discover the sound of Detektivbyrån? Was it in musical experimenting, was it by wanting to combine specific influences, was it on purpose or accidental?
We wanted something new and beautiful. I think you can say that our sound evolved half on purpose and half accidental. It’s a good question. Paul McCartney said that he still doesn’t understand how he writes music, I can definitely relate to that. But we knew that we wanted it to sound big with small means. Less is more.

What do you want the listener to discover within your music?
Like Sam says to Frodo: ‘That there’s some good in this world.’

Do you have specific messages behind your music?
Try play it backwards and you’ll see! No, actually I don’t think so, the music is about the music.

In what ways and by what non-musical entities are you influenced in making your music? (for example, art, literature, etc.)
I get inspiration and influences from: snowboarding, building stuff, sewing, 60s cowboy books about “Bill & Ben”, Harry Potter (both the movies and the books), instruments, building instruments, astronomy and theoretical physics. The best thing I know is when music gives you an adrenaline shot so that you truly forgets about time and space, just because you’re having so fun with it. It’s a very simple thing but in a way that’s really everything I want.

What makes a good live performance for you?
A great mixture of response from the audience, the feeling of giving them a good show and the feeling of playing great music. Hopefully the performance will take you to the above mentioned state, and that’s really it! It’s often just short “glances” of that state.

Has anything stupid or silly happened to you while performing or while on tour?
A fun thing happened when we played in Katrineholm, a small city in Sweden. I play the lead melody on synth in one of our tracks, ‘Laka-koffa’, and succeeded in pressing down one important knob that I shouldn’t and the sound completely changed. The sound was so loud and overwhelming, but I had to stick with it through the whole song, otherwise it would’ve been too obvious that I had made a mistake.

Nothing else but my synth was heard during the rest of the song. The sound was so much in the style of Vangelis, the synthesizer giant from Greece. We laughed a lot at it afterwards and went to YouTube and checked out Vangelis and realised that his music is great. So it happened that we started to listen a lot to Vangelis and nowadays we relate a lot to his types of sounds when using synths.

In what ways will your new album be forward movement from the Hemvagen EP? In what ways is it keeping the same sound?
Maybe there will be some Vangelis type of synthesizer somewhere on the album…
But we will stick to the beats, the accordion and the glockenspiel a lot. You’re going to recognise the sound of Detektivbyrån. For me one very nice thing that will be completely new on the album is that I’ve started to play the vibraphone. It’s the loveliest instrument and so fun to play.

What are your plans for 2008?
Finishing and releasing our upcoming full-length album. Everything else will have to come after that! We’d love to play in the US and Australia of course…

Links:
www.myspace.com/detektivbyran
www.detektivbyran.net