Svaneborg Kardyb

Special Guest: Ambre Ciel

Superkilen, the new album by Danish duo Svaneborg Kardyb, is named after a public park in the ethnically diverse district of Nørrebro in Copenhagen. The former wasteland was repurposed by the art group Superflex in early 2010 to bring immigrants and locals together in tolerance and unity. The title is emblematic of the group's music, which is just as inventive in creating space and calm as a tonic in the tense and crowded environment of life in 2020. In the same way that the redevelopment project has transformed the neighborhood, Svaneborg Kardyb have used this positive energy to inspire change in their own music.

"'Superkilen' means 'super wedge' in Danish," says Nikolaj, who has a studio right next to the park, "but it's a very expressive word, with the connotation of a breakthrough, like taking a piece of wood and breaking it open." Jonas completes the image: "It's like something that insists on being there, something from the outside that comes in, and it just moves forward and there's nothing you can do about it - we had to allow that on this record."

Thus, Superkilen and the ideas surrounding it became an integral part of the psychogeography behind Svaneborg Kardyb's latest album. Unflinching synthesizers and haunting beats meet sublimely nuanced textures of piano and drums familiar from her earlier work. Listeners are taken on a sonic adventure each time, one that contains much of the soothing sonic vocabulary that has won them fans worldwide, but one that is also unpredictable and whose narrative can change abruptly with the subtle introduction of a single new chord or an imperceptible rhythmic shift. Intricate, captivating and clearly more than that, "Superkilen" looks set to live up to its name and bring about a dramatic rise in SK's career.

Special guest: Ambre Ciel
Ambre Ciel is a composer, violinist, pianist and singer from Montreal, Canada, who makes dreamy, spacey pop music influenced by contemporary classical artists such as Agnes Obel, Patrick Watson, Sufjan Stevens and Thom Yorke. But also the impressionistic world of Debussy and American minimalists like Phillip Glass and Steve Reich as well as the "music that breathes" of artists like Gyða Valtýsdóttir, JFDR or the joint work of Jónsi and Alex Somers.