Little Dragon Interview

Little Dragon Interview

With their fourth album, ‘Nabuma Rubberband’ released this May, Little Dragon are back with a whirlwind of music full of atmosphere and electricity. To talk about it in more depth, we caught up with drummer, Erik Bodin, all the way from their hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Hi Erik, how are you?
I’m fine, thank you.

Where in the world are you right now?
I’m at my apartment in Gothenburg.

What have you been up to?
My 4-year-old daughter had her birthday!

Ahh awesome! We’ve been listening to Little Dragon’s latest offering, ‘Nabuma Rubberband’; as your fourth studio album, what do you want it to say about you all as a group?
I think we just want to tell the world that we are still evolving and having fun and doing our thing. I feel like we had more time than ever before, so that gave us the opportunity to be sure about who we are and what we do. We actually had a year-and-a-half off from touring and we’ve just been home, going to the studio every day and even taking some breaks away from it and coming back. It’s been good.

It’s extremely atmospheric with your strong use of electronics and Yukimi’s hypnotic voice; is there a certain amount of experimentation when you head into the studio or do you have a set plan in mind?
We don’t ever have a set plan. Sometimes we come up with a concept at home, when your creative mind starts to spin, but you usually forget those ideas and then as we come to the studio it’s experimentation and usually takes the same procedure. It’s usually me or Håkan and Fred making some kind of musical sketch and it can be anything from a rhythm or a bass line, then as soon as Yukimi catches onto something that inspires her, she will start writing and we will record and improvise and try ideas as we go. It’s not far out experimentation, but we keep on trying until we find something that inspires us.

What does inspire you?
What really inspires us as writers is when you start working on a piece of music and usually it’s kind of dead until this magic moment, when it grabs you because you made a little beat and it doesn’t really do anything  for you, but when Yukimi does her vocals, then you get very inspired. That’s maybe a little bit selfish, but of course we love music, we love listening to all kinds of music that gives us the goosebumps. With creative inspiration it’s more about being in the studio and seeing it grow.

What is Nabuma Rubberband?
The cover of the record is the little girl in the air, and that’s the name we gave her. We had a song called ‘Nabuma Rubberband’ before, and it’s a play on words. I had a little sketch called ‘Nabuma’, which is from Uganda, it’s a girl’s name, and Yukimi started writing about Rubberband, because sometimes Hip-Hop guys say rubber band about money, because of the rubber band that you put around stacks of money… It was such a weird marriage; she didn’t know I’d called the song ‘Nabuma’, and I didn’t know she’d called it ‘Rubberband’, so it became ‘Nabuma Rubberband’ and it stands for a lot of things on the album, like the two ingredients: Nabuma is a very beautiful name while Rubberband is very industrial, so it can be many different things, but in this case it feels more dark, and that’s the theme throughout the album – a mix of happy and sad.

We love the online promotion you did for your fans to tell them about the album; can you tell us more about it and how it worked?
That was something we came up together with our label and it came from the ‘90s where you could call your favourite Hip-Hop group and get a trailer of a track over the phone, so we wanted to do something more 2014. First we were thinking of Skype, but it’s more of an Internet thing. It sounds kind of crazy and abstract, but I think we were trying to do something fun.

Track seven is just eight seconds of what sounds like an introduction to the title track; can you explain its purpose on the album?
It is actually just an intro to ‘Nabuma Rubberband’; it’s called Lurad, which means “I fooled you” in Swedish. We were just bored and wanted to make something stupid! We weren’t sure whether we were gonna put it there but… we thought “ahh let’s do it and maybe it will create some question marks”. Actually my daughter’s in the beginning of ‘Nabuma Rubberband’ screaming “Luraaad!”

From American TV series’ to video games, your music really enhances emotion and symbolism; would you ever do an entire soundtrack to a film if asked?
Yeah, we would definitely be up for that! I don’t think we intentionally wanted to make film music, but after you keep on doing it, it is very atmospheric. It draws you in and it creates a visual by itself in your mind. There’s no project set to be done for film, but we’d love to.

Is there a film you would have loved to have made the music for?
Now my mind is blank! I really like ‘Drive’, that’s a great movie with a great soundtrack.

If you could work with anyone in the world, dead or alive, whom would you choose?
I always wanted to work with Jimi Hendrix, but he’s dead. I would have loved to see where his mind would be in this day and age; I always felt like he did something beyond the norm. He was breaking some limits. That would be my dream.

Besides music, what are your other passions in life?
I really love sports, actually! I joined a speed skating team here; it’s very fun and challenging. I’m not particularly good at any of the sports I’m doing! I think it keeps me grounded, keeps me sober!

So, Yukimi inspired the name Little Dragon due to her tantrums in the studio; has she managed to rein them in?
[Laughs] Yeah, definitely! It’s almost like an Olympic fire; someone else has to be the Little Dragon now. Sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s Håkan or Fred. I feel like Yukimi is the most harmonised now – she managed to channel it out through creativity.

Check out the online promotion of ‘Nabuma Rubberband’ right here, and let Little Dragon tell you themselves: https://bit.ly/1eWwyDc

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