Analog Monoxide’s New Album Songs for the Road Mixes MIDI with “Minor Swing”
Analog Monoxide.
If you check out Analog Monoxide’s soundcloud and listen through, you might think that he has an eclectic taste in music and reposts several of his favorite artists. But then you realize that all of the tracks are his.
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Stian Høyberg, the man behind the Monoxide, does not collaborate when it comes to his own music. He goes all-out-Prince on every song he writes, recording every instrument himself. If he wants a new sound from an instrument that he hasn’t yet mastered, he’ll drop everything and spend days learning to play it.
“It’s a lonely and very time-consuming process,” Høyberg says, “But it allows for a lot of freedom and full control, for better or worse.”
Høyberg is a product of Ørsta, a small town located among the fjords of Norway. While his musical career spans two decades, he has only begun to release his work in the last few years. Not only does he play every instrument he uses, he also takes care of all the production himself.
“Sometimes I wonder if I’d like to just leave the hours of tweaking knobs to someone else, but another part of me wonders if I’d be able to give up control,” says Høyberg. “Maybe I’d just drive them insane. I guess that comes down to chemistry. I just spend a lot of time, trying to do the best I can do, in this regard. It’s a lot of work for me.”
His second album, Songs for the Road, comes out on April 15th. The album wanders between improvisational jazz, math, ambient, folk, and experimental electronic.
“I’m trying to cover a lot of ground, there’s just so many good forms of music in the world. So it’s modern electronica one moment, and studying Django Reinhardt the next.”
Despite the album’s name, Høyberg does not have any plans to tour with his music so far. “I’m not sure how I’d go about getting a group together that would be diverse enough to do all the instruments and parts. It’s possible, those people are out there who could do that of course, but they are usually knee deep in their own stuff.”
You can stream “Playing Tag,” a track from his forthcoming album, on soundcloud.
