Six years after their debut album ‘Fabled’, alternative electronic music outfit Paperdeer is back for another gripping journey with the release of ‘Pastel Days’. The new album by Benjámin Kiss and Norbert Biro was created both in Budapest and Copenhagen, as the producers are now living in two different countries since 2015, becoming also an exercise in distant music-making, with numerous other musicians contributing to the record.
We caught up with Paperdeer to talk about the release of ‘Pastel Days’, how they met, what’s their chemistry like, their live set, and more.
Electronic Groove: Hello guys and welcome to EG. How are you? Where are you right now?
Norbert: We are feeling great! We just had two shows in Budapest where we had the chance to put new innovative elements into our music on stage, so we are very positively charged at the moment. I am about to head back to Denmark later today, but now we are still sitting in a café in our hometown.
Electronic Groove: What can you tell us about your musical background? How did you guys get together to form Paperdeer?
Norbert: So, Benjámin and I went to the same elementary and high school together, where the education was built around music, rhythm, entry-level art, and alternative thinking. We loved to hang out, paint, and draw in high school but we never really created anything together outside of school. Although Benji’s parents have been musicians for decades, he was more into skateboarding than playing any instrument. I had no musical background at that point, I wanted to be a snowboarder. There was a snowboard video game that included soundtracks slightly modified to fit better to the actual terrain or mission, and I could never find them anywhere so I decided to try recreating them from scratch. During this time I fell in love with the endless options of writing electronic music, I spent a whole summer creating my own tracks for riding. Once I finished a 7-track-long unreleased EP, and I showed it to Benjámin, but I never expected him to bother too much. Surprisingly, he got excited and started experimenting too. At some point, we started making instrumental songs together until our first singer, Emese Stewart, joined us. Then we named the band and started publishing songs and videos under the name Paperdeer.
Electronic Groove: Congratulation on the release of your second album ‘Pastel Days’. How has the reception been so far?
Benjámin: It has been really good! Some songs were picked onto numerous editorial, regional, and other influential playlists. Some songs even got into airplay rotation in France and Australia. The related music videos were also critically acclaimed by art, film, and design communities, and quite a crowd came to the first two shows after the release.
Electronic Groove: What can you tell us about the inspiration and concept behind the album?
Norbert: We had lots of songs that preserved feelings and thoughts from certain periods of our lives. Basically, we were just collecting composition drafts on our laptops, which we wrote wherever we were at the moment. For example, we wrote ‘Morning Swell’ together in a harbor in Tenerife, ‘Fortress’, ‘North’, and ‘Regularity’ were born in Scandinavia, while ‘Us’ and ‘Gazsiafter’ were inspired by our chaotic night outs in Budapest. All the songs turned out to be some kind of audio version of images capturing emotions and thoughts we were dealing with, inspired by our current environment and life situation. We always loved the idea of putting songs into a bigger context where they make more sense than individually. With ‘Pastel Days’ we wanted to put these captured thoughts and feelings into a linear structure, from the vibe of the past we had together when we were living in chaos (the first third of the album), through dreams, traveling, and fun (the middle of the album), to the worried speculations of the future (the last third of the album). ‘Orbit City’ was originally a thought experiment inspired by retro-futurism, where we tried to imagine how a person in the ’70s could have imagined the music of the future being listened to in those hovering cars.
“With ‘Pastel Days’ we wanted to put these captured thoughts and feelings into a linear structure”
Electronic Groove: There are a few collaborations on the album. How do you select who you think might be a good fit for each track? How’s the matching process?
Benjámin: We almost always have a voice singing in our head while we are writing our songs, so we usually look for artists, who exactly match these ideas we have already imagined. Artists get under our radars mostly on Soundcloud or Youtube, these platforms are also good places to initialize the communication. We also had some songs on the album where we found the ideal voice in the group of our friends, for example, ‘Us’ was sung by the wife of our friend, Viktória Vadász.
Electronic Groove: We’re loving the animated ‘visualizer’ for the album on YouTube. Where did the idea come from? And tell us about the story behind the animations? Who did them and what’s the storyline behind it?
Benjámin: The visualizer was designed and animated almost entirely by me. It was a huge project to create an almost one-hour-long animation. When we started making music videos for the album, I wished to have a video for every song. I really liked the style of animation and the graphics of our music video for ‘Gazsiafter’, made by Saba Anwar and Annamária Radnics, and I also have a graphic design background, so I thought: why not make this a reality? The animation reflects on the topics of the songs. We imagined a life situation for every song when we were brainstorming about their titles, so I tried to adapt these stories into simple shapes and animations. The color palette was a given, hence the name of the album ‘Pastel Days’.
Electronic Groove: We know the ‘live’ part of events has been on stand-by, but are you planning any tour to share the album?
Benjámin: We are actually on tour since we released ‘Pastel Days’. We will have one show in Copenhagen, and two more in Budapest before the end of this year, and we are already organizing concerts for next year.
Electronic Groove: What’s your live setup like? How do you incorporate all the various singers into the performance?
Norbert: There are two ways we perform live shows. We have a live-act setup for club-like dance gigs where we use a launchpad and an effect controller to reconstruct our songs in an improvised arrangement by combining elements of the original tracks, sometimes accompanied by a singer. This way we can get pretty close to the original sounding while still being able to put new ideas into the music. The other setup is a five-membered live band, with Benjámin on the keyboard and me on the launchpad, Attila Bakos on the bass guitar, Dániel Czippán on the drums, and a singer – currently, we play with Blansch. We put a bunch of creative effects on the vocals and the instruments, and we layer samples over the acoustic drum sound triggered when one of the snare’s membranes gets hit. All the vocals are sung by our singer or me, but I completely distort my voice with a vocoder or other effects when I sing. When we play as a band, the songs sound very unique, quite different from the released versions, which gives us a whole palette of artistic options to innovate.
“We imagined a life situation for every song when we were brainstorming about their titles, so I tried to adapt these stories into simple shapes and animations”
Electronic Groove: What’s the story behind the name ‘Paperdeer’?
Norbert: If I remember well, there was an origami deer next to Benjamin’s instruments. So we just named the band after that.
Electronic Groove: If we’re visiting your hometown, what’s your favorite place to grab a beer and something to eat?
Benjámin: Our go-to place for a beer is Lámpás, which is located in downtown Budapest. It’s a little, but cozy bar, a place for every kind of musician. The last time when we were there, it was an open mic night, and a singer called Zubi performed in front of like 10 people. He was pretty talented and when we searched his name on youtube, we realized that he has some songs with more than 30 million views. We were pretty shocked by that. There is another place that we like if we were to grab a coffee or have breakfast downtown: it’s called Vinyl&Wood, it’s a place where quality and good style meets, and it’s also managed by one of our friends.
Electronic Groove: Thanks again and we wish you the best going forward!
Benjámin: Thank you very much, and thanks for having us!
Paperdeer’s ‘Pastel Days’ LP is out now. Purchase your copy here.
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