Extreme Hazard Planet from Bjørn Felle is out on the 3rd of May, and you have the chance to hear the whole thing in its majestic and eclectic entirety before anyone else.
Join Bjørn at this free listening party on Bandcamp and be among the first people to hear the album, as well as chatting to him about the LP's themes, recording and production.
Cassette + Digital Album
Double cassette edition in a stacked, clear case including full colour j-card, recycled brown and green cassette tapes with full-colour on-body print. Featuring artwork by Nico Gutierrez. Strictly limited edition of 50.
All merch orders include digital downloads plus free bonus goodies, badges and stickers. This image is a mock-up, so actual colours might vary slightly.
Includes digital pre-order of Extreme Hazard Planet.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
shipping out on or around May 3, 2024
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Streaming + Download
Pre-order of Extreme Hazard Planet. You get 2 tracks now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
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Following on from a triumvirate of releases - standalone singles Dopamine and Theory of Mind, and the otherworldly Nostos Algos on the latest AnalogueTrash Label Sampler - Bjørn Felle is set to unveil his first full length album this May.
Bjørn Felle’s creative output is eclectic, engaging and energetic; an idiosyncratic electronic sound inspired by 80s synthpop and punk, 90s techno, house and indie grunge, the odd 16-bit video game soundtrack, and a healthy dose of psychedelia. As a result, Extreme Hazard Planet sounds like a blend of the tongue-in-cheek party vibes of Holy Fuck and the character-piece songwriting of Blur, amped and industrialised and then degraded with the lo-fi VHS vibes of TVAM.
Exploring the album’s genesis, themes and inspiration, Bjørn explains:
“Extreme Hazard Planet is the neon alert blinking on your head-up display. It's the warning blaring in your helmet. It's the history of a civilisation encoded in a probe and launched into the unknown, in hopes that another planet might learn not to be doomed to repeat that history.
“Closer to home, it's my way of trying to understand the growing tendency within humans for self-destruction. It's a story told in roughly chronological order, starting with instincts like tribalism, the pleasure principle and empathy. The album takes a brutalising joyride through the wasteland, touching on our apathy towards the whole thing along the way.
“The album was written with the intention of it leading seamlessly into its satellite EP Paradise Moon. The two records are dichotomous, with Extreme Hazard Planet sounding harsher and more industrial, and focusing on feelings of anger, resentment and confusion. There's humour in there too though—I'm kinda mocking the whole thing in a way. Such an irrational situation is almost funny in a sick sense.”
This is an album that is as sonically diverse as it gets, with an almost ‘kitchen sink’ approach to production and song-writing that allows Bjørn’s ideas and craftsmanship to take centre stage while taking the listener on a sonic and thematic journey through his influences, inspirations and ideas. He continues:
“The sound on Extreme Hazard Planet is quite diverse so it's difficult to pin it down and describe how it sounds. Some of it is really esoteric electro, like Admonition and Theory of Mind, which are kinda like Röyksopp on a bad trip. A lot of it is industrial, taking inspiration from 80s electro industrial goth bands like Skinny Puppy and Killing Joke. Then there's straight up weird stuff like a 16-bit cover of the ‘let's all go to the lobby’ song. I don't like sticking to ‘a sound’; I prefer letting the songs sound how they want to.”
Extreme Hazard Planet also saw Bjørn’s production process shift towards a more fluid and abstract approach, resulting in a new level of experimentation that allowed the tracks’ overarching concepts to evolve organically. He continues:
“The production process for Extreme Hazard Planet was quite different from music I've made before. While recording Daddy Issues I pushed the software I was using to a limit. I was using Reason, which lets you draw wires between instruments like a hardware rack. Dozens of instruments and hundreds of effects in a single project with a mess of wires wasn't much fun to work with, so at the beginning of recording Extreme Hazard Planet I switched to Bitwig.
“This software allows the same level of modular control over the instruments and effects in the session, but in a cleaner and more abstract way. My initial experiments while getting to know Bitwig resulted in jams which became some of the songs on the album.
“Typically, my process starts with the concept and the words, with melodies, chord progressions, basslines and percussion developing subsequently, and usually in that order. Having tracks already forming without concepts attached to them meant I could try different songs and see what worked with each track. Some of these tracks have existed as several songs, and a couple have gone back and forth between the album and the EP before finding their place.”
Set for official release this year, satellite EP Paradise Moon represents the natural and somehow inevitable companion piece for Extreme Hazard Planet:
“Paradise Moon, out shortly after the album, has a softer synthwave vibe and aims to communicate feelings of sadness, disappointment and fear, and a desire to escape from humanity. They're separate records, but like the Earth and the moon they are part of the same thing, one made from the other and trapped in an orbit it can't escape from.”
Bjørn is big fan of computer games, and the evocative and highly descriptive name of each release may seem familiar to gamers:
“They both come from No Man's Sky,” reveals Bjørn, “with a 'paradise moon' being a type of moon, and 'extreme hazard planet' being a warning you hear when you land somewhere with like firestorms or volcanoes or high levels of radiation. It got me thinking about what a paradise moon would be more literally, which got me to this concept of a resort on the moon to escape the conditions planet-side.”
credits
releases May 3, 2024
Written and recorded by Bjørn Felle
Synths/programming/bass: Bjørn Felle
Guitars: Santiago Wais and Bjørn Felle
Produced by Bjørn Felle and Dave Radfern
Mastered by Dave Radfern
Cover art by Nico Gutierrez (@nico.gutierrez.art)
With thanks to Dave, Mat, Ady, Mark, Santi, Andy, Saff, The Hanging Bandits, Robbie at Filmack and Bowser
Experimental electro. New album 'Extreme Hazard Planet' and EP 'Paradise Moon' both out 2024 on
Analogue Trash. Almost literally a bear (working on it)
supported by 16 fans who also own “Extreme Hazard Planet”
There’s just so much great music coming out of AnalogueTrash. Love the diversity of the artists on their roster so much, and the passion and love behind everything they do is so genuine and infectious! Deany Sevigny
