Photo by Peter Beste
The Tiny
Issue #23
Although the Swedish band never really found a niche in their country’s music scene, they may find one in the States
By Daphne Carr
Published: March 1st, 2005 | 11:59am
She says Joni Mitchell, but it’s a dumb question, so I don’t blame Ellekari Larson, the enigmatic lead singer and songwriter for Sweden’s the Tiny, for giving me a dumbfounded look. “Well … everything I listen to has influenced me,” she said. Cellist Leo Svensson, conservatory dropout, shrugs. Johan Berthling, the double-bass player whose record label, Häpna, releases a vanguard of tasteful electronic music, agrees. Everything.
Everything together is white noise, but if you filtered and refined, tuned in and got quiet, you could find a crystal distillation that is the Tiny. Their debut album, Close Enough, was recorded live in two days with no overdubs and sounds as fragile and mystic as anything John Cale could make of Nico on The Marble Index. The same frigid separation pervades, but where Teutonic chanteuse Nico’s worked largely with dry delivery and her super-star aura, Larson channels a different set of vixens. It would be dishonest if I didn’t write about how uncannily her delivery resembles that of Joanna Newsom (those luscious vowels, the Björk-y growls). I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that I wished Kate Bush’s orchestral arrangements were as sensitive, the balance as thoughtful.
British buzz for the band hangs around this comparison, though the Tiny feels more a kinship with what is being considered the new weird America: Devendra Banhart, Vetiver, Newsom. Having formed in 2002, the band has never really found a niche in the contemporary Swedish music scene. “I don’t feel that we’re part of the same sphere as the Hives or the [International] Noise Conspiracy, but I feel that we’re here because of them, because there was an interest in Swedish music,” said Svensson, who swears that the band has played in “every possible club in Sweden,” including an unlikely first gig in a Greek restaurant.
This image of them playing over banged-down plates of baklava is laughable — the Tiny acoustic mic their instruments and rely on sparse arrangements suitable to the theater stage more than the rock club. “In the beginning we’d play at clubs and almost no one wanted to hear it. There was talking all the time. It was impossible to hear who was playing what,” Berthling said.
As their audience expands, a reverie like that of the Low audience forms for their haunted narratives and broken music-box sagas like “No Money,” where Larson intones, “No money left for meeee / I spent it all on things,” with the unnamed objects taking on a shadowy, sinister light cast by a clanky reed-organ accompaniment. This track and “Just Like You,” a double-stop drone sing-song about taking on the burden of love, are standouts among the album’s 10 charming songs, released in the U.S. by Eyeball Records. In Sweden, Larson runs the Tiny’s label, DetErMine Records, distributed by V2 Scandinavia. They hope to record again this spring. I asked, a bit greedily, if it only takes two days to make them, shouldn’t there be many more Tiny records. “If you’re paying,” she said, laughing.
Larson began her music career as a trombonist but later switched to the piano. Why the trombone? “Because my father played it,” she said, and then goes on to tell a story of how much she hated her jazzman father’s tuba when she was small. “I took it out into the front yard and stuck a hose into its bell.” Here I would say her musical inclination flowed like a fountain and mischief led an elvin way to psych-folk, but more it was that she dallied about in the Stockholm music scene where “everyone knows everyone who plays, or has played in the last few years,” said Larson. She played ska, punk and jazz until she met Svensson at a bar. “I had another band but I never found people who had ideas like mine. They all thought I was really weird. Now … I wouldn’t want to play with anyone else.”
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