Todd Terje

Essential Albums

  • It's Album Time
    It's Album Time
    It's Album Time

    It’s not usual for dance and electronic acts to make great singles—only to choke when it comes to putting together an album. Chalk it up to the perceived significance of the format: If singles are designed to get people to dance, albums should convey a full artistic vision. In Todd Terje’s case, it probably helped that he didn’t take himself too seriously in the first place: When Norwegian state radio passed on adding his song “Inspector Norse” to its rotation in 2012, claiming it sounded like background music for a beach bar, Terje not only agreed with them, he followed up with a track called “Strandbar”—literally, “beach bar”. Terje’s attitude was so pathologically goofy that it was easy to miss how rare a feat It’s Album Time was upon its release in 2014. This is 60 minutes of music from a serious dance and electronic producer that you could sit down and enjoy as pop. Disco remained the anchor (“Inspector Norse”, “Strandbar”). But the rest of the album explored 1960s movie soundtracks (“Leisure Suit Preben”), video-game music (“Swing Star, Pt. 1”), romantic synth-pop (the Bryan Ferry-featuring “Johnny and Mary”), variety-show jazz (“Alfonso Muskedunder“) and a whole host of styles usually relegated to the cultural trash can. Terje had come from dance, but the spirit of It’s Album Time was closer to cocktail-lounge exotica like Martin Denny or the fusion of Japanese artists like Haruomi Hosono or Yellow Magic Orchestra: Kitschy, light-hearted, but deeply knowledgeable of its terrain. Anyone can be serious. But funny is another story.

Albums

About Todd Terje

Todd Terje arrived on the Scandinavian dance scene in 2004 and, in short order, became one of its prominent figures beside early supporter Prins Thomas and Hans-Peter Lindstrøm. Terje channeled a voracious appetite for several styles of music into warmly received edits of tracks by Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, and Santana. He also made a splash in 2005 with "Eurodans," one of his own productions. The man's remixes of Lindstrøm's "Another Station," Studio's "Life's a Beach!," Kaoru Inoue's "The Secret Field," and Dølle Jølle's "Balearic Incarnation" weren't easy to avoid in discerning DJ sets. On 2010's Remaster of the Universe, Terje served up a collection of his edits and remixes in the form of a DJ mix. ~ Andy Kellman

FROM
Mjøndalen, Norway
BORN
11 May 1981
GENRE
Electronic

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