Swedish pop duo Niki & the Dove take wing

Malin Dahlström and Gustaf Karlöf, photo by Eliot Hazel

Sure as our maple trees produce sap, Sweden remains the world’s deepest well for elegant, irresistibly catchy pop music. Stockholm duo Niki & the Dove produce the exact type of supernatural, dense, too-good-for-your-common-dancefloor productions one would expect based on their nationality (and sci-fi novella album cover), but just because their music is unmistakably Swedish doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.

Studio obsessives Malin Dahlström and Gustaf Karlöf spent a couple of years spackling every square inch of their 2012 debut Instinct, transforming a bevy of synths, drum loops and Dahlström’s very Scandinavian vocals into a gleaming sonic rainforest. If anything, Instinct proves Swedish pop may never reach a saturation point as long as the quality remains high.

I gabbed with the very zen Karlöf by phone about leaving the Mecca of Pop for the Big Apple and recreating Instinct on stage with only two people. I also tried to extract some insight into the top-secret process of how pop sausages are made.

Erik Leijon: Is it true you two relocated to New York to work on new music?
Gustaf Karlöf: Our plan was to stay in New York and to live there, but we were offered a tour in Scandinavia this past autumn, so we weren’t able to leave. I shouldn’t say anything is confirmed yet, but we do have plans to maybe return to New York in the spring sometime, to try to live there and write music, but you never know.

EL: Are you hoping moving away from Stockholm might affect the kind of music you make?
GK: We lived in London for a year, and I lived in Sydney for one year, as well as Paris for a bit, so we’ve moved around, and I definitely think travelling is really important in becoming a more sensible person, not just for music. You get to meet your fellow man, and you notice he’s exactly as you are. It comes out in the music, or with anything that has to do with expressing yourself. The problem is we’ve been travelling so much — we’ve been touring for almost two years — so we long to sit down and focus and concentrate on the music. If we live in New York maybe we’ll get a lot of inspiration, but maybe we won’t get as much time to devote ourselves to music, so we’re worried about that.

EL: How are you able to recreate the songs from Instinct on stage with only two people?
GK: I use a lot of synthesizers and I use samplers. All of the songs are divided into small samples that I can put in and put out, and therefore we can improvise the form of the song and the dynamics. We’re going to have a drum machine and in that sense you can arrange the song on the spot. Malin has samples and synthesizers as well.

EL: Does that set-up allow for much improvisation?
GK: We try to have some improvisational parts, like the starts and endings. I think it’s important to have an improvisational attitude about the songs. Even if we’ve played a song many times already, we must keep our minds open and not forget the songs are alive. When it starts to feel static, that’s when it becomes dangerous, both for me and Malin, and the audience will feel it too. It’s important to remember songs can take on different waves from one night to another.

EL: Have you been writing songs lately?
GK: In one sense we’re always in a writing mode, so we have tons of these small ideas laying around, that we’ll get while on the train or in soundcheck. But to sit down and finish a song, you have to focus and be disciplined.

EL: Are you constantly jotting down song ideas?
GK: We’ll use a laptop or a phone, or a piece of paper to write down things. We always try to have a machine with us where we can put down ideas. Malin always has something to write on in case she gets an idea for a lyric, so we have those machines. It works like that, where we’ll get these ideas, and it’s very important for us in this early, fragile stage that we not describe new ideas, even amongst ourselves. It’s important not to verbalize, to put things in words, because then it becomes something different than if it’s just up there in an abstract space.

EL: Is that what being in the studio is like, turning abstract ideas into something real?
GK: We almost always write the song and make sure it’s finished before going into the production stage. It’s a very exciting phase of making music, going from this spark or this core to building it, putting a costume on it and giving it a soul. Another important thing for Malin and I is to keep that spark throughout the making of the song. Sometimes the spark that was there in the beginning can be lost, and you have to go back and find out where it went wrong. I think it’s possible to feel the power of a song, even at the most early stage, but if we don’t succeed in keeping that, we’ll usually put the song in the trash.

EL: Do you put a lot of songs in the trash?
GK: (Pauses) I think anyone who deals with expressions has a lot things in the trash (laughs). ■

Niki & the Dove perform at le Belmont (4483 St-Laurent) on Tuesday, Jan. 15, 9 p.m., $15/$21.50