If asked which band is Norway’s best-kept secret, the too-protean-to-pin-down Sister Sonny or the instantly accessible Demonstration Tapes, just say “yes!” As Bandcamp tells us, the Demonstration Tapes, which came together in 2023, “consists of Fredrik Færden, Lars Heintz, and Pedro Carmona-Alvarez — all former members of the ’90s band Sister Sonny, who released albums between 1998 and 2007 before falling into a coma.”
It was, as comas go, productive. Lars Heintz became a theater manager, Fredrik Færden a buyer of TV shows for a broadcasting company, and Pedro Carmona-Alvarez an award-winning novelist and poet. (“Yeah,” says Fredik, “he’s the famous one.) Then they thought: wouldn’t it be cool, with America’s 250th anniversary coming up, to record one song for each U.S. state? “It sounded like a typical thing that we would do,” says Pedro. “It’s big enough to be filled with anything that you want, and still it’s something that can hold together your project.”
The Tapes’ released their first 14 state songs last November on the relentlessly catchy and endearingly quirky First Amendment. With each track sounding like the work of a different band, the album could pass for 40 minutes of high-quality college radio circa 1985-’90. “That’s a good period,” says Færden. “When you say it’s like different bands,” adds Heintz, “this is because when we write we don’t have a standard formula that we follow.” “And,” says Carmona-Alvarez, “it’s no censorship between us. Everything’s ‘Yeah, sure. Why not?’”
The trio, who played SXSW in 2000 as Sister Sonny, hasn’t visited most of the states they’re writing about. But they feel as if they know them anyway.
“It’s difficult maybe for a U.S. citizen to understand how deeply U.S. culture is embedded in our everyday life,” says Carmona-Alvarez, “but nothing here is subtitled, we learn English in school, and most people speak English. So it feels very close. At the same time, we filter the U.S. culture through our gaze. So it comes out a bit weird.”
