Artist: The Little Hands of Asphalt
Title: Dystopian Sci-fi / Six Feet Over
Format: Digital single
Cat#: Fika080SG4
Release date: 6th March 2020
Bandcamp | Spotify
The full length record, Half Empty, will be released digitally in five parts, before being released on vinyl on March 27 on Fika Recordings and the Norwegian label Furuberget. These songs are the first release from Little Hands of Asphalt since 2012. And the band picks up the thread where they left off; low-key pearls with hints of indie and Americana, but primarily classic, timeless pop.
The Little Hands of Asphalt are Sjur Lyseid's solo project, whom released two records and a couple of EPs in the period 2009-2012. Floors, from 2012, received critical acclaim in Lyseid’s home of Norway, and was voted the sixth best record of the year in the Norwegian national newspaper VG. Press praised Lyseid's melodic qualities; and was been frequently highlighted as one of Norway's sharpest songwriters in English. The band toured most major festivals in Norway, and a lot on the continent. Since then, the project has been quiet, and Lyseid has primarily worked as a producer and songwriter for other artists at this Six Feet Over studios in Oslo. Now he's back in front of the glass, with what may be the project's strongest songs ever.
Dystopian Sci-fi
My last album, Floors, was very much a political album. Maybe not explicitly so, but still. Half Empty is not. I don't really know why. Because if there was ever a time to be political as an artist, it's now. Perhaps so much that for a lot of us, indifference,complacency or pure anxiety has taken over. This is my attempt at putting those feelings into song-form, and writing much else about it seems futile and is hard for me to do. It’s a story about someone who writes dystopian sci-fi, and what it does to them, as well as the dystopia itself. So I'll let Maja Lunde, author of several dystopian novels (also referenced in the song), try to say something about it:
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night stuck in a pattern of thoughts, and can’t go back to sleep again. Images stream through my mind of the world out there – a world that’s on fire.
This fear is living side-by-side with my day-to-day worries and frustrations, and sometimes it dwarfs everything else. It’s an existential anxiety, it relates to humankind’s place on our planet, our species’ ability to survive, and the future of my children. At times this fear is overshadowed by a grief that is also new. I am grieving over all the plants and animals on the brink of extinction, and all the other species that are suffering because of us, the insects, the bees. I’m not alone in this. The fear and sadness I feel have already been named: climate anxiety and eco-grief.
Many people can pinpoint a moment of awakening that was the start of this anxiety and grief. We have known about the crisis for many years, but have failed to face up to it. Then something happens – you gain a new insight, you have a new experience, perhaps you see a change in the natural world, and this becomes a turning point. “Our house is on fire”, as Greta Thunberg puts it. Facing up to the crisis is like standing face-to-face with a fire. What used to be something you knew intellectually becomes a realisation that you feel. This creates anxiety. It may not always be that strong. It may come and go. But the image of a fire is impossible to forget. It bowls you over, it engulfs most other fears.
What is my message? That is a question I am often asked. I don’t have an answer. I don’t write to communicate a message; I write because I have stories I need to tell and a great many questions that I am mulling over. The most essential questions are about the human animal: What is it about human beings that enables us to lord over the other species? And do we have it in us to put things rights?
Homo sapiens surpasses all other species when it comes to communication, storytelling and transfer of knowledge. These abilities have led to many of our achievements: Printing, the agricultural revolution, the digital revolution, among others. Our ability to communicate and pass on knowledge distinguishes us from other animals. So does our ability to empathise with other people’s lives. Nothing symbolises this more clearly than literature. Literature is precisely what distinguishes people from animals. Our ability to communicate is the starting point for all our innovation, development and growth. This ability is also the undoing of our species and all other species. But at the same time, our ability to tell stories and to communicate with one another is perhaps our finest quality.
I believe we need stories more than ever, and we need a language to express the strong feelings many of us are struggling with. These feelings make us look at ourselves from outside and consider our place in the world. They are overwhelming and terrifying because they connect each and every one of us, every little individual, our own significance or lack of significance, to our great planet as a whole, to all the other living beings who have their home here, from the tiniest microbes, to insects and all other animals, to the rich living resources of the oceans, to the atmosphere, to the universe itself.
We need to feel this anxiety, this panic, in order to want to change. We have to acknowledge the environmental crisis, we have to feel the heat from the fire, in order to understand what the crisis means. Literature can awaken the whole spectrum of feelings. It can move us from objective understanding to subjective experience; it can make the climate and environmental crisis personal. Not least, it can stimulate our imaginations and foster empathy, not just with other people, but also with other species. Literature can take us to the heart of the beehive, it can help us understand that we are all part of the same superorganism, whether we have two, four or eight legs, that we humans – the strongest species on the earth – have an enormous responsibility to take care of all the other beings that live here, for the simple reason that they have huge intrinsic value, quite independently of us.
Maja Lunde is the author of international best selling novels History of the Bees and Blue, as well as several other novels, short stories and movie scripts. She’s also my sister, in everything but name.
Six Feet Over
The video for Dystopian Sci-fi was filmed in the lounge/kitchen of Six Feet Over. Six Feet Over is my studio. The name is a strange one, and one I've regretted repeatedly, like this stupid band name of mine. Which is something that just got stuck, from back when it was just a few songs I'd recorded for myself and a few of my closest friends. Unlike the band name, however, the name Six Feet Over has a clear motif and a meaning. It's in an old industrial building in Tøyen, Oslo. Located above a grave stone masonry. So there you go, I'm a poet, yeah I know it, hope I don't blow it.
Six Feet has been so much more than a studio for me, though. It's been a place of creation, community, excitement, sometimes refuge, and where I've made and maintained most of my adult friendships. Plus all the amazing records I've been a part of making there, of course. The song "Six Feet Over" is my attempt at celebrating both the physical place and the people I've shared it with. After ten years we'll soon pack up and leave, they're turning the building into condos.
This is weirdly the most self-biographical song on Half Empty. It's also the most tounge-in-cheek. In a way, that sums up what I think is the central theme of the whole thing: What's a character? What's a persona? Can you truly write about anything but yourself and your own experiences? Am I able to write about anything but writing? What am "I"? Who are "you"? What is love? (baby, don't hurt me).
It's a song I wasn't sure was going to go on the album. I'm still not really sure it fits, lyrically or musically. It's the only country-song on there. So much that it uses all of the cliches. But we had so much fun recording it, and hopefully that sense of collaboration and effortlessness shines through. So here's to three chords and the truth! Or four chords and a lie.