Superkilen Svaneborg Kardyb

Superkilen, the new album from Danish duo Svaneborg Kardyb, Nikolaj Svaneborg (keyboards) and Jonas Kardyb (drums), is named after a public park in the ethnically diverse Nørrebro district of Copenhagen. This erstwhile strip of waste ground was repurposed by the Superflex art group in the early 2010’s to bring together immigrants and locals in a mood of tolerance and unity. Its title feels emblematic of their music, which, equally inventively, creates space and serenity as a tonic within the tense and cluttered environment of 2020’s living. In the same way that the regeneration project has transformed that neighbourhood, Svaneborg Kardyb have drawn on that positive energy to help instigate changes in their own music.

“‘Superkilen’ means ‘super wedge’ in Danish,” says Nikolaj, who has a studio right next to the park, “but it’s a very expressive word, with the connotation of a breakthrough, like taking a piece of wood and cracking it open.” Jonas completes the picture “It’s like something that insists on being there, something from the outside that comes in, and it will just move forward and you can't really do anything about it – we had to allow that on this record.”

So, Superkilen and the ideas surrounding it became integral to the psychogeography behind Svaneborg Kardyb’s latest album, as they brought more intrepid synths and emphatic beats to the sublimely nuanced textures of piano and drums familiar from their earlier work. The listener is dragged along each time on an aural adventure which involves plenty of the soothing sonic vocabulary which has won them fans world-wide, but which is also unguessable, and whose narrative may turn on a dime, on the subtle introduction of a single new chord, or imperceptible rhythmic shift. Intricate, absorbing and distinctly more-ish, ‘Superkilen’ feels like it will live up to its name and prompt a dramatic climb in SK’s career trajectory.

On Superkilen the duo also draw on their recent touring experiences after the breakthrough of their Gondwana Records debut Over Tage and NPR Tiny Desk session. They’ve seen all-standing festival tents erupt into dancing during more driven passages in their set, as well as glimpsing darker aspects of life beyond their home country, and those experiences have inevitably influenced the music they made on their return home, for their fourth LP. You hear it in the toppling, out-of-control beats and eventual resolve of ‘Vakler + Balancen’, the insanely burbling synth pattern which propels the title track, and the synth interference which ultimately engulfs the closing Arendal – a vision of an industrial eco-catastrophe, maybe, destroying the initial idyll. Yet, for all that, so much of the delicate beauty in SK’s music remains. The beatific ‘Udsigten’ (or, ‘View’) reflects, in its title, the jaw-dropping outlook over the sea from the floor-to-ceiling panoramic windows at the studio they worked in, Karmacrew Recording, on the island of Møn, off Denmark’s South-East coast.