New Music: Tic Tic – Capsule

Norwegian duo Tic Tic describe themselves as an electronic duo; Capsule will upend your expectations of what that should be.

Tic Tic’s Irene Svendsen and Kai Drange have mentioned Dead Can Dance, Massive Attack, and Depeche Mode as playing a role in their music. It’s there in the tremor-inducing CinemaScope of Capsule, but the resulting sonic experimentalism and divergences from the norm here are more in tune with the sweaty throes of garage or post-punk, expressed to a 50s beat, than rarefied and carefully sculpted trip-hop or electro-rock. You’ll come away from it all not so much confused, more trying to place it within a recognisable context, but maybe it’s better and more rewarding to just enjoy it instead.

“Capsule is about making a conscious choice about what you let into your life and, ultimately, what becomes part of you. We are far more easily influenced than we like to think,” discloses Svendsen. “The people we surround ourselves with, what we read, what we scroll through online, and how we choose to spend our time all shape who we become.”

They add of the nature of their music and its creation, “Sometimes Tic Tic feels like a paradox. While new, partly self-developed technology is central to what we do, we are often reluctant to embrace many of the powerful tools modern music production puts at our fingertips.”

“Do we lose something when we press the fix button instead of recording a new take? As Tic Tic, we surround ourselves with blinking machines while at the same time romanticising a time that will never return. That tension shapes both the music we make and the way we work,” says Drange.

Tic Tic’s Capsule album is scheduled for release on the 27^th of November on Apollon Records. The title track is streaming on Spotify and SoundCloud; for more listening choices and album details, connect with Tic Tic on Instagram or Facebook.

Header photo by Benedikte Olsen