Håkan Lidbo and His Personal Quasimodo
Интервью · 31.08.2005
By Iovik
Swedish producer and DJ Håkan Lidbo is a well-known figure in European music circles. His distinctive trait is changing his creative personas like gloves. The list of his aliases would fill an entire page: Lidbo sometimes poses as the synth project Data 80, sometimes as the non-existent soundtrack composer Bobby Trafalgar, and sometimes he starts making cover versions of Swedish Eurovision-winning songs. This year Håkan Lidbo created a new homunculus named Quasimodo Jones. It's a terrifying mix of rock, electro and very bad taste. Quasimodo Jones' debut album, "Robots & Rebels", came out this summer on one of the wildest labels around, Shitkatapult.
Well, that's a joke by the guys at Shitkatapult, of course — in reality it's far more modest: over fifteen years of my producing career I've released somewhere around 160-170 records. And that's putting it mildly — before that they wrote that I was a record-label prostitute, since I never stick around long at any one of them. That's how much fun they are over at Shitkatapult. The real reason for my unfaithfulness is that I write a huge amount of different music, and a single label simply can't handle it all. When you're on one label it's like being in prison — you have to prop up their sound with your tracks year after year.
That's more PR in the small-record-label style. Let me tell you something: when somebody says "look, we've put out a record by a new techno genius from Afghanistan", it's most likely not true. There's so much music around these days that everyone resorts to all kinds of tricks just to make theirs stand out from the general flood.
All right, all right. So as for "Sexy Robot", I recorded that track back in early 2000, as a joke about how dance hits were made in the eighties. Now, of course, all those synth sounds have come back into mainstream music. That's not so great, because I've met some young DJs who think electro was invented in the late nineties. But honestly, I even like the fact that electronic music is looking back to the past now. There was so much interesting stuff back there. You know, during some of my sets I don't play any records younger than 20 years old, and they sound very contemporary. As if they'd just come off the press.
Yep, that's right. I'm all for pop music — good pop music is actually the hardest thing of all to make. By the way, the new T.Raumschmiere album is also very poppy, in my opinion. Marco is a real rock star. But I didn't make Quasimodo on my own. I'm responsible for the synth sounds and all the electro stuff there; the rest was done by Joe Koonz III himself… who is in fact Quasimodo Jones. All those dirty guitars and rockabilly are all his. And you know, when two completely different people try to combine different musical styles in one product, it's very interesting to work on, and the result, in my view, turned out excellent. I consider Quasimodo Jones the best thing I've done to date.