Drivan Releases “Disko”: A Talk with Kim Hiorthøy

Drivan started when Hiorthøy was asked to score a performance that is, in his words, “not a play and not a musical,” called The Potato Country, that was performed in part by the girls, who “aren’t necessarily dancers.” Hiorthøy, who is also a successful graphic designer based in Oslo and Berlin, said of the experience: “I had never written a musical before. But when I wrote it with them, it seemed like it would be a good idea to make a record out of it just to try.” Hiorthøy then called Smalltown Supersound owner Joakim Haugland and asked if he could “make an album with some Swedish girls singing,” which managed to garner him an instant green light.

Naturally, the album isn’t exactly ‘normal.’ The lyrics are sung in Swedish. Secondly, even in Swedish, the lyrics make little to no sense. Unlike its name might suggest, it’s absolutely not disco music, of Italo, Nu, or any other variety. Lastly, it’s structured like a hip-hop song, yet sounds electronica. But then again, it ceremonially nods at the skeletally visceral approaches to music often found in tribal enclaves native to places far from where it was recorded in Southern Sweden.

“It’s sort of incoherent. It’s a lot of sentences that are statements of truths,” said the bearded Hiorthøy from a house in Edinburgh, Scotland, where The Potato Country is running another performance. “If I were to translate some off the cuff, they would be:

The legs are feeling weak/ We take a small simple melody/ That’s not going too bad
The next time I see you/ I will punch you very hard in your eye

There’s one that has a refrain that says:

When you lose your memory/ I will lie to you about everything in your life/ And everything is going to seep away in a bad soup.

I didn’t really think about what they lyrics were about as a whole, until you had asked our publicist about them when the promos came out.” Hiorthøy added that when he went back and looked at the lyrics, he “realized that many of them were about collectivity, groups and then statements about the future. But they also have a lot to do with destruction, or negativity. The outcome is often bad, but that there is maybe a kind of force in that.”

Whatever myriad things this project claims it isn’t, or might be, what it clearly is terribly effective, beautiful music. It’s all clearly a bit mad and otherworldly but it’s actually very easy to understand, even to an ear tuned only as far as the poetry unfurled by the Swedish Chef.

As the album was physically conceived upon Hiorthøy’s loops, it sounds very much like his signature, laid back yet cathartically organic sound. It also sounds a bit daft at times, replete with strange words such as “laderlapp,” which both translates to both “Batman” and “piece of leather” in Swedish. Even still, when the only two recognizable words in English are “camping van” and Volvo, it’s not to say you won’t eventually try singing along. And it’s for that very same reason that the album managed to avoid the side of the street that is so out there it becomes simply incomprehensible. By utterly bucking most systems from dance theory to musical generic categorization, its simplicity transcends all expectations, leaving it lulling in the strangely magical and seductive warp of its creators’ imaginations.

Or, as Hiorthøy said while describing The Potato Country: “It sounds much more avant-garde than it is. When you experience it, it’s not at all hard to get. It’s quite concrete, but it’s not something that makes sense if you put it together in a narrative.“