Rune Lindbaek

new mix available. check  in media section

London legends Idjut Boys and Norway’s Rune Lindbaek wander across musical genres as Meanderthals.

Casting the Runes
The Idjut sensibility didn’t just set off alarms in Blighty; their music quickly resounded almost all the way to the Arctic Circle. “I bought ‘Jazz Fook’ and it blew my head away,” Rune Lindbaek tells me from Berlin, his excitement still audible a decade later. “I went, ‘Wow! My God!’ They used to be in Oslo all the time, at a place called Skansen—an old toilet of a venue voted the world’s third best club by The Face, after Body & Soul and Basement Jaxx—a legendary place. The Idjuts were big Oslo heroes, long before the rest of the world discovered them.”

Around 2001, the Idjuts floated the idea of working together with Lindbaek on a studio project. “He was over in our studio so we asked him to speak in Norske on ‘Laisn,’ to lend it that real soul slow-jam, drop-your-pants moment,” the duo recalls of its first collaborative track, a tune that inexplicably injected a Muddy Waters/Johnny Winter snippet into woozy and spacious deep house. Of course, it took years for the trio to follow up. “Just them asking was a massive compliment,” Lindbaek states. “I mean, they’re such big heroes of mine, as well as good close friends, but we’re not very organized people.”

Seven years would pass before the three finally slotted time to work together, only to have their plans suddenly derailed by a disastrous bike accident. “I was in Vilnius, Lithuania where my girlfriend was working on a Norwegian film, and four or five days before we were going to meet up and start the album, I got a call that Conrad was bicycling and had been hit by a truck,” recalls Lindbaek. McDonell spent the next seven months convalescing, undergoing surgery on his hips and shoulder. The Idjuts sum it up cavalierly (“He was knocked off his bike. It hurt a lot. He’s better now.”), but Lindbaek says it was fairly serious. “He was very badly hurt. At first we only hoped he would survive but… he has a very strong build. He even did work a bit as a bouncer back in the days in Sunderland—a rough place he comes from—and that’s what saved him. Luckily, Conrad is completely back and even jogging again. So, [Desire Lines] was a recording on life and death.”

Slowly, work on Meanderthals re-convened. “I’m a melody man, I have to have melodies,” Lindbaek explains about what each party brought to the sessions. “What they put in their music—the delay, the really cool sound—[it’s] truly three-dimensional… They’re masters at it, with their sexy synths and old compressors.” 

“[The Idjuts] are two of the most friendly and kind persons on the planet,” Lindbaek continues. “They have morphed into the super-organism of music geniuses [that contains] the legacies of Lee 'Scratch' Perry and François Kevorkian and the souls of the best records in the world all rolled into one.”

Media:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTuYF0h1XLM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHsKa2ZA8Gg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-dxvQqEQdU

Meanderthals (Idjut Boys & Rune Lindbæk) on Resident Advisor
http://www.residentadvisor.net/news.aspx?id=10189