Skyphone

Skyphone is an electronic trio consisting of Keld Dam Schmidt, Thomas Holst and Mads Bødker. Having played in various rock outfits during the nineties, and having been friends for decades, the three of them began experimenting with the obligatory samplers, tape decks and noisy Roland GM modules of the time.

The process of getting to know new instruments, time-consuming as it is, slowly but steadily made defunct the rock bands, and in 1999 Skyphone was founded in the leftover room at a painters studio in Copenhagen. What might have prompted more industrial noises from the band, namely the room’s concrete walls and floors, was quickly, and to some post-industrial (and rather apocalyptic) aesthetic effect, covered with various carpets.

The ensuing result, using a quirky outdated Power Mac (a 7300 to be precise), a sampler (an AKAI S3000), some synths (erm…a Moog Satellite, a Roland SA09 and the terrible Roland GM synth) and hundreds of minutes of recorded sound, were some failure ridden, but otherwise nice sounds, that somehow seemed to go well with the carpets. Moving to new, comparatively luxurious premises in 2002, the band feared for their unique sound, but the romantic myth of the creative power of the shabby bohemian loft (or, as in this case, industrial depot turned into a painters studio) was found to be just that...a myth.

Having replaced the quirky Mac with shiny new PowerBooks and lots of software, Skyphone continue to scratch and carefully damage the shiny surface of the digital sounds, creating tiny and melodious pop-songs-without-singing, leaving it to the listener to infer what the songs actually could have been and what is lurking virtually beneath the constrained, deliberately ambiguous surface of the song.