ELECTRIC EYE
Meet the Norwegian stargazers tapping into oceanic energy.
GETTING AWAY FROM it all in search of your creative muse is hardly a new thing. Whether it’s singer-songwriters locking themselves away in remote log cabins in the 00s, or the relocation to the country to ‘get your heads together’ that was obligatory for bands at the turn of the 70s, it’s a time-honoured tactic. But Norwegian space rock explorers Electric Eye chose a more original location than most to inspire their fifth studio album.
“We found this disused lighthouse on a tiny island about an hour’s boat ride away, out in the North Sea,” explains guitarist and vocalist Øystein Braut, who co-founded the band in the small town of Haugesund on the rainlashed west coast of Norway in 2012.“We rented it out for a week and most of the album was written there.”
The result, Horizons, is characterised by stormy but evocative, mostly instrumental jams that could just as easily soundtrack underwater exploration as they could the search for distant galaxies.
“The island is really tiny and all you see is horizons all around,” Braut explains, “which kind of gives the title away.” That might suggest a low-key, ambient affair, but the reality is far more diverse, drawing on the same range of the styles the band have blended since their 2013 debut Pick Up, Lift Off, Space, Time.
The kosmische organ swirls and excitable polyrhythms of opening track En Bekymringsfri Koloni
(translation: ‘A Worry-Free Colony’) evoke an alternative subaquatic universe, but they precede Last Call At The Infinity Pool’s blissed out prog-funk groove in which Braut relates visions of a ‘lunar liquor store’ and informs us: ‘I’m the man on the Moon.’
Elsewhere, The Singularity’s guitar motifs echo Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross on a gently meditative, soft-sung reverie in stark contrast to the squalling heavy psych of Our Water Is On Fire, and to Lighthouse Rock’s instrumental evocation of beat pop’s first dabblings with mind-expanding substances.
“We just got to hang out by ourselves and work really intensely for those days,” says Braut, “just making sketches, jamming, making as much stuff as you can. Then we brought ideas back into a studio and started recording properly.”
While out on the island, the quartet also found further inspiration from appropriate extra-curricular viewing.“We were watching this YouTube series about Jacques Cousteau and the crew of the Calypso. His narration is really cool, so we decided to jam around that voice, and it ended up on the record.”
His evocative tones can be heard on The Sleeping
Sharks, while the viewing of Werner Herzog’s volcano documentary Into The Inferno offered further inspiration.“He was narrating really dramatically on top of this incredible footage. So we listened to that while we jammed.”
Of course, the freedom to travel to remote islands, or anywhere else for that matter, has been a luxury denied to us all at some points over the last two years. Thankfully, Electric Eye’s island getaway took place in 2019, giving them time to fine-tune the record closer to home since then. But for a band that have already released two live albums, the prospect of treading the boards again is as exciting as anything Mother Nature can offer.
“I almost daren’t hope it’ll happen!” says Braut. “I saw this video online, of race cars raring to go around a track, then they go, there’s a huge crash and they all have to turn around and go back. And the title of the clip was ‘Every Band Trying To Tour In 2021’. I can’t wait to finally get out there…”