Revealing Korallreven
The feeling of spirituality permeating the venue is not by accident. Korallreven, a collaboration between Marcus Joons and Daniel Tjader, takes its inspiration in part from the otherworldly beauty of the Catholic church choirs Joons heard on a 2007 visit to Samoa. Joons shared his vision with Tjader on a hot day in Stockholm while the pair was playing football, saying he wanted to create pop songs that were spiritual like the choirs he heard and hypnotic like tropical nature. Above all Joons wanted to create a feeling of yearning to get to a state of mind where you feel “as young as yesterday.”
This is a reference to one of the group’s most popular songs, “As Young As Yesterday,” which, along with “Shine On,” was a crowd favorite at the Bowery Ballroom. While they don’t cite any specific influences for An Album by Korallreven, released in August 2011, Joons says that they know where to go with a song fairly quickly. However, to keep things interesting, they imagine the “antithesis” to the first idea and incorporate that too. The guys of Korallreven often come up with ideas for songs separately, but, according to Joons, they always complete the songs together and “wonder where all of [this] magic came from.”
Part of the “magic” is that Korallreven’s sound seems to be appropriate in virtually every setting: with hundreds of people at a club in New York City, sitting alone on a deserted beach, as background to a fashion show, and, according to the barometer of all things high and low (New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix) as a song to remix and set the history of rave culture to.
Responding to the myriad interpretations and descriptions of their music, Joons says they “like to write songs and see the world in pastel colours instead of black and white. Nothing is black and white.”
Regardless of the color, we like the way Korallreven sees the world.
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You can see Korallreven on April 14th in Istanbul at Babylon, on May
11th in Paris at Le Trabendo, and May 19th in Stockholm at Debaser
Medis.
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Sarah Harris is a jack of all (or maybe no) trades and lives in New York. She loves to travel, study art, volunteer, and occasionally write some things. Like this article.