Wallpaper Silhouettes Norway

HISTORY "We'll get by!"

Wallpaper Silhouettes was formed in Trondheim in late winter of 1999, originally as New Horizon. The duo consisted of the two friends Mats Davidsen (guitar, vocals) and Tony Jacobsen (bass, vocals) who both were obsessed with the thought of creating depth and atmosphere out of stripped down melodies. Although the line-up was minimal, the output proved to be quite powerful, merging delicate and lightweight melodies with harsh and pessimistic lyrics (as was their view on life, love, and basically everything else).
Along with their constantly growing pile of 4-track demo tapes, so came a change in their musical focus which suddenly pointed them in quite a different direction of writing...

Sometime during 2000 it was brought to their attention that New Horizon sounded like a dreadful boy-band, and even worse, was aslo the name of a relegious sect! They wisely dropped it and a search for a better name began, which they incidentally found during a trip to Denmark - with holes in their pockets they had to spend an entire night on a bench in Copenhagen, and afraid that someone would steal their things they had to stay awake the whole time. From now on they would call themselves The Bench. And with the name came also a dramatic change in music genre; their flair for melodic atmospheres was still intact, but now they saw themselves as pessimistic gothrockers (without the image!).

2002 saw them in yet another musical change, change of name, and even a new line-up. They'd got bored with drum-machines so when Jo Henning Dahlø brought along his drumming gualities to their sound, search for a rehearsal room began. Just a month later they were playing their first gig as a trio and with a new and smashing name, Wallpaper Silhouettes, the concerts became more frequent and their musical direction was becoming more obvious to them now than ever. But still in lack of a keyboard player to complete their live sound they brought in Jan Ottar Nystad (from Mornings).

By mid-2004 their debut album 'Echo The World (We Live In)' (having gone through mixing and mastering etc a million times) was finally finished. The bands own choice was to release it on cassette, a limited edition of 300 copies. Unfortunately, this didn't have any other effect than a little bit of attention in the media, amongst interested etc. The whole idea was rejected as a thing from the past; noone's got cassette-players nowadays!

In November 2004 work on a new album was made possible by Lars Lien of legendary 'Brygga Studio'. Although the deal was to spend only one day in the studio to write, produce and record one song with a "special producer" whose name will never be revealed, the whole session lasted about two weeks, and eight songs were recorded! These songs make up their forthcoming album 'Hollow Earth'. The album is due to release sometime in 2005.

And the band played on…

by Ms. Spinning Belinda

Taken from wallpapersilhouettes.com, the official website.