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You Need to Hear This

These Nordic Guys Reckon They Can Make Food Taste Like Music

FYI caviar tastes like Nick Drake and nightmares.

Food and music have never really gone together, if you thought about a perfect food accompaniment to most albums you’d be eating soufflé with Nothing Was The Same or chowing down a Rustlers burger to go with Example’s latest album.

Which is why when I found out Ja Ja Ja festival would have bands collaborating with Nordic Sound Bite to make taste experiences of certain bands musical sounds, I got excited that someone had found that missing link. Ja Ja Ja, the definitive Nordic club night, held at the Lexington, has put on some of best Nordic bands like Shine 2009 and Rangleklods, now they’ve brought them from Iceland, Sweden and Denmark etc, to show the UK pop world a thing about catchy choruses and melodramatic lyrics. In a way the food idea kind of made sense, as most Nordic music is built on something that wouldn’t work at first (keytars, anyone?). Determined to see if music and food was the perfect combination and realising that I had been eating only eating chicken nuggets and toast for the past four days, I went on down to the Roundhouse for the festival.

Annoncering

The first taste experience thrown at me was the “Wild Flower” drink, this went with Sin Fang, whose music would soundtrack a really nice car advert. The drink tasted pretty innocuous, schnapps with a slight kick of popping candy; I found the Nordic twist when I saw the stem of a flower floating about in the drink. This reminded me more of something I’d find discarded in a pub car park than a luxury cocktail. When I asked Sin Fang for his opinion of the drink he describes the bitterness of the beetroot working against the pop rocks as the “best way to experience” his music.

I wanted to find out more about someone whose sole goal it was to make me drink cocktails made from beetroots and flowers, so I cornered Nikolaj Danielsen, the curator of Nordic Sound Bite, the company behind the idea. According to him, it had come from “listening to twenty seconds of each band’s music and thinking of something suitable in the laboratory” he believes that the link to music and food “dates all the way back to cavemen”. I may not have understood a lot of what he was saying but I admired anyone who wanted to supersede Heston Blumenthal’s mad scientist ambition.

Skulking off into the night I spent the next morning researching the new wave of Nordic music that was sweeping the country, if only for the weekend. Bands that would be playing the festival ranged from LCMDF, the girl pop duo who unironically have a song about wearing wayfarers. To Mew, who’ve probably soundtracked a million whale births. All in all Nordic music certainly has a bright and varied future.

Annoncering

The next day brought Sakaris, whose album I Have Beautiful Eyes sounds better than the title that precedes it. His sound bite amounted to a crowd of people giving away balloons that were littered with dots of pink meringues. This seemed vaguely normal so I was looking forward to it. My hopes were shattered though when I bit into the humungous piece of rock salt embedded in the meringues themselves. After I’d picked off my eighth meringue dot, I was getting used to the idea of music and odd tasting food, maybe I’d even start on a healthier diet…lulz, nah, I love my microwave way too much.

It wasn't long before I was confronted with my next sound bite; this wasn’t so much edible as three spray bottles to try in a random order during NO NO NO’s show. Thinking that there were no more surprises up their sleeves, I readily sprayed all three at the same time, the taste of them reminded me of NO NO NO’s music, a dizzying headrush of sugar filled pop whistles and synth stabs played like they’ve just heard their first New Order mixtape. I later found out the flavours had included vinegar, apple cider, beetroot juice and various other tastebud molesting flavours.

The final sound was also the most elusive. I only stumbled upon it in a corner of the Roundhouse during Kid Astray’s set. Confronted with innocuous toothbrushes with tiny black dots that resembled some kind of anti-toothpaste, I had the option to try it out. Once I’d scraped across my pearly whites, I then read the description “dotted spheres of algae, skye and caviar". The taste was somewhere between eating pâté flavoured with bin juice and a smoothie that had been left on a radiator. The band’s synth folk jumble sadly got sidelined in favour of finding somewhere to get rid of the caviar taste.

Annoncering

But the real question is: did the sound bites actually enhance the music? My thoughtful conclusion…yeah pretty much; weird food can compliment weird music really well, they just need to lay off the caviar.

Follow Dan on Twitter @keendang

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