The following is taken illegally from the Komeda website...www.komeda.se Can you hear the earthquake? It’s the pop world rumbling. The superstars of the late 90’s are either being fired or going bankrupt, while their record companies want to sue the crap out of an entire lost generation who is down-loading TV series and games (and probably dying pop songs as well) from the Internet. In the meantime, new, young bands are being forced to charge themselves full of so much ideological indie-energy that they can no longer conjure up the power to contribute to pop history; everything has now been copied to such an extent that only faint echoes now remain. Echoes that no one will hear in the earthquake. But in a bumpy orbit above the pop-cultural disaster-zone of the western world, there is a space capsule that you may have heard of, the one carrying the most select choice of human pop, the rescue capsule called Komeda. When it was launched from a base in northern Sweden ten years ago, few people could comprehend what its primary purpose was. Up until now, Komeda’s sound has been muffled by the roar of the earthquake; its guiding light darkened in the growing cultural twilight. But natural forces also sustain Komeda. This is how the capsule has been able to jettison its indie-shell and join with the world’s largest and mightiest record company, further enabling it to set out on the most important rescue mission in the pop world, under the sole command of Komeda and the highest pop culture. The name of this mission is “KoKoMeMeDaDa”. The purpose of the Komeda pop capsule is to sort out the most valuable grains of creative pop, from the early 1960’s and forward. Then they refine them philosophically in a perfectly tempered greenhouse of thought, where thousands of shimmering rows of DNA-spirals hang like drapes from the ceilings: ABBA hooking onto the folk music archaeologist Harry Smith, Devo onto Deleuze, Allen Toussaint onto Can and Brian Wilson onto Bourdieu, and so on, from Love and The Velvet Underground to Boards of Canada and Ekkehard Ehlers, Scott Walker, Burt Bacharach, Magazine, Stephan Mathieu. And the result is what is now being sent out as a rescue vessel through pop-space – the new high-density molecule “KoKoMeMeDaDa”. All a person has to do to be evacuated is to put all his trust in a CD player that has been modified with this molecule for a while. Since the first test flight (Pop på svenska) in 1993, Komeda has expanded its range of frequency in two stages – “The Genius Of” in 1996 and “What Makes It Go?” in 1998 – and has so far not failed in one single rescue. Tens of thousands of people have already been saved. But this time it is about a global earthquake, brought on by weapons of mass-destruction – reality-shows, nursery rhymes and porno-chicks – which have spread devastation throughout vast parts of the industry. Komeda has also suffered losses: capsule cadet Mattias Norlander vanished after a friendly-fire incident. It was as a result of this that Komeda changed its strategy and its record company. The agreement made in April 2001 with Universal allowed the group’s brain trust – Lena Karlsson and the brothers Marcus and Jonas Holmberg – to build a new command centre in Umeå. A low-technological research centre with a compressor, a Soundscape system, a Nord Lead synthesiser, Hofner- and Vox- amplifiers, an old Dux radio as well as one expensive and a few cheaper microphones. But most important of all: they had their hands free, the capsule was manoeuvrable and the molecule had the ability to spread over great distances. Even though the last few years have been a lot about demanding mobilisation, the Komeda team’s know-how has still found the time for a number of smaller rescue operations. For example, the film directors Måns Herngren’s and Hannes Holm’s motion picture “Det blir aldrig som man tänkt sig” was saved by the single “Check It Out”, and millions of children have been saved with soundtracks of animated films, and most recently by a contribution to the Billboard-climbing Rhino collection “The Power Puff Girls, Heroes and Villains”. And even though they have already sold-out US tours, performed on MTV and HBO and held out helping hands to influential fans such as Beck, Holger Czukay and Stereolab, the most important work for Komeda continues to lie in the future. “KoKoMeMeDaDa” is an international manifestation, a “Live Aid” for pop aficionados, a revolution that begins in the individual CD player but ends on the other side. Every single rescue mission takes place in an everyday environment, where the needs for identification and dreams meet. This is why “KoKoMeMeDaDa” tells about the breaking points between disgust and pleasure, between hope and sorrow; about the illusions of success and materialism; about waking up from a stand-still and coming to the conclusion that you have to change yourself; about foresight and scope – and about the destruction of the world. And of course about sex and cars, about the affection in breaking the boredom as well as being young and disco-punk-cool at the Umeå club Elvira in the 1980’s. From a purely scientific point of view, the rescue operation is conducted so that the water level in your hearing system is restored, which occurs as soon as you have modified your CD player with “KoKoMeMeDaDa”. The roar will pass and be replaced by small purling streams of swells and ringing. Thereby, a broader awakening of waterpower also appears that will, in the long run, be able to support more and more liberated amplifiers and music computers. From the beginning to the end, “KoKoMeMeDaDa” is an angel of mercy of sound. The sound of pop in the cracks of the earthquake.