Fires of Denmark are having a sneak peek release party for the latest album, Relativity, at the Seventh St Entry on Thursday, November 4, 2021. The album won’t be available elsewhere until November 12, but you can get it in person on Nov 4. Hope to see you there!
Relativity is an album that will meet you where you are. You can give a song a one-off listen and thoroughly enjoy it or you could put it on auto-repeat for days and still keep listening. The music is heavy synth, danceable yet moody. It feels free form like drone but after talking with band founder Mike Terrill, I understand that what separates this music from drone or noise is that he works with a hook that your ear can go back to, even if that only shows up in a bass line. (One of many lessons he learned from David Byrne’s How Music Works.)
Mike draws from a world between art and science; the music is part extreme organic and part complete manufacture. The musicians recorded the album in a fantastic Frank Lloyd Wright house in Wisconsin. (Demonstrating that place matters!) They played for hours. Later, Mike chose the parts he wanted – almost like bricks and moved them to where he wanted them to be to construct musical buildings.
There is a definite pandemic-inspired theme of the relentlessness of time. The titles of the first songs on the album give it away:
- Time Will Wear You Down
- It Goes On
- And It Never Ends
- Start Living Outside Time
And each song feels like a different day during the pandemic. There’s a drive in Time Will Wear You Done that feels like a drag, whereas And It Never Ends feels more like an adventure. The mood shift models what we felt during the time. It’s cathartic and could easily drive a person to dance – in the best most obligatory way. There’s a pull in the music that feels subconscious; Mike told me a little bit about he worked that magic too.
Mostly Minnesota 