Gidge: The ‘Monday Is Ok’ Mix

Originating from Sweden, Gidge are a duo who seek inspiration from a somewhat uncompromising environment. Cold, harsh winters leave little room for musical warmth and creativity, yet somehow the pair manage to maintain a depth and meaning to their sound which transcends far beyond their surroundings. 

The pair first met back in school at the age of 16. Rooted in the small city of Umeå Jonatan Nilsson and Ludvig Stolterman quickly became friends through a shared love of the abstract and electronic music. This would later materialise into them producing music together as the duo Gidge. This month saw the release of their second mini album on Atomnation, a record label not known for compromise or a sub standard release policy which has previously hosted music by the likes of Weval, Olaf Stuut and Sau Poler. 

We caught up with the pair on the back of the release of their latest work 'LNLNN' as they deliver a Monday mix for Ransom Note. Listen and read the interview below: 

What is the the exact relation between LNLNN and Lulin? 

Technically speaking, we made LNLNN by taking pieces from Lulin and using them as a foundation for new, more dance orientated tracks. You know, songs that are more like *songs*. It started with us wanting to implement the Lulin music into our live set somehow, and we just realised that it worked so well that we felt we wanted to make it into a release of its own. Philosophically speaking however, there’s a bigger difference between the two records. When making the album Lulin, the way we saw it was that it was her music, only it was made by us. We wanted to capture the essence of Lulin, the being, and we wanted the music to reflect her world, her loneliness. LNLNN on the other hand, while based on the music from Lulin, is our music.

Have nightclubs helped to play a role in your sound or has it been more a combination of environmental factors?

It’s never a nightclub setting that solely creates inspiration for a sound or a track, rather we start where the raw feeling is, whether its in the woods or from something we saw in a film or something else, that is where we start. The beat and the image of what this would sound like on a dance floor is secondary, although often equally important.

LNLNN is said to be based around the theme of nature, the woods in particular, why so?

As we make our music with so much of our sound coming from field recordings and from the woods, pretty much everything we make has a woodland type theme, or feel. However, LNLNN in particular is not more forest based than our previous two records really. Lulin is definitely the one record that, to us at least, is ”closest” to the forest. Ludvig even did a field test before we released Lulin, by going out into the woods at night when it was dark and listened to it, and it was pretty scary actually.

How do you write music as a pair, in what order or structure if you will?

We mostly write our songs quite separated. The way it usually works is we start off on new ideas separately, then show it to the other person. We then give each other feedback on the idea, and we discuss in which direction we want to take it, and what the general structure of the song should be. Then the we go back to working on the songs separately and after some more time, we meet and go through the process again. And that’s how we do it, either until the songs are basically finished or until we’re sick of the song, in which case we switch with each other. But actually it varies so much from song to song as well, there’s really no one single way that we do this, it depends so much on each individual song.

Sweden isn’t stereotypically a country known for it’s electronic music culture, would you say this has benefitted or limited you as a duo?

Where we’re from there was always space and time and to some extent a healthy limitation of influence from the electronic music culture. This gave us the freedom to search for our sound in a pace we chose. So in that sense our limitation was beneficial.

Buy the new release HERE.