Kasper Bjørke: A FILTER Interview

What do you get when you take a long-time DJ and producer who got his start as one half of Danish Pop house outfit Filur, is known for remixing everyone from The Ting Tings to Trentemøeller, but is now putting out his sophomore pop album on hfn, a sub label of one of Berlin’s finest minimal techno labels, Poker Flat? In brief, the beautiful, mixed up musical mind of Copenhagen’s Kasper Bjørke. Standing on Top of Utopia truly includes nearly everything, from No Wave and Italo to Pop and Techno, but it’s not to say it doesn’t make sense. The music is so damn catchy. From the glossy, chugging bass lines to twisted synth solos to an otherworldly Rolling Stones cover, every style is given a full representation of its art. And there are even beautiful string arrangements to boot. How can you go wrong?

FILTER recently caught up with Bjørke for a phone discussion about his delightfully schizophrenic dance-indie sophomore album. 

Your videos are beautiful, but what’s up with the boy who drinks milk in “Efficient Machine”?

Kasper Bjørke:  He is a model, just like the man from the “Young Again” video. I found him in a friend’s short movie. He was drinking milk in the entire short movie, so we kept that bit. I only seem to have naked boys in my videos, and it’s beginning to become a bit worrying. Florence [Tetiér], who made the “Young Again” video, is going to do a video for the Rolling Stones cover of “Heaven.” I hope it will feature a girl, and possibly a naked one!

The music on this album really goes through so many different styles, from Italo and No Wave to Pop and Techno. What was your original music background?

Way before I made any music whatsoever, I teamed up with a friend and became half of a group called Filur. We took an Atari computer and just made stuff in the moment. We literally had no plans to do anything big with it. But, we eventually got signed to Danish Mega Records, who then released and managed Laid Back and Ace of Base. It was at the end of the peak of the record business. They spent a lot of marketing on us, which was great and ultimately launched my career. 

The first disco I ever went to was in Hjorring, Denmark, when I was a teenager. It was called Fuzzy’s Discotheque. I don’t remember Filur…

That’s completely insane! It’s such a boring town. Well, it was pop house though that was not really our intention. It just happened. Eventually, we decided to develop as individuals, and also together… so he made Who Made Who. And I went out DJ’ing a lot. I went solo in 2007 and that work is a reflection of my DJ career, as well as what I listen to at home. I know it’s a very diverse album, but I wanted to keep it very focused with a thread of sound and production. It’s a contemporary pop album at its core, despite all the different sounds that are included in it.

You work with quite the list of collaborators, from Danish locals such as Jacob Bellens and Trentemøeller to New York’s The Pierces and Italian string composer, Davide Rossi. How do you choose your collaborators?

For this album, I deliberately chose people who were close to me in some way, or from my city. The result was friendlier in terms of collaboration. The last album on the other hand, was with people in New York, for instance, so it was a different vibe. In this album, we have Louise Foo, the little sister of Sharin, the singer from The Raveonettes and the Danish singer, Jacob Bellens. The keyboard and bassist is one of my best friends, the art and video come from Swiss artist Florence Tetiér and there are remixes from Who Made Who, Serge Santiago and even a mix on the way from  Matias Aguayo from Kompakt. F

Kasper Bjørke's new album, Standing on Top of Utopia, is out now.