Interview Taxi Taxi!

Il debutto delle Taxi Taxi! su Rumraket -l'etichetta degli Efterklang - ci e' piaciuto al punto da sentire l'esigenza di fare quattro chiacchiere con le gemelline svedesi che hanno dato un contributo di cui forse loro stesse neanche se ne rendono conto al filone nu folk di matrice nordica. Abbiamo scoperto che la fama (in Italia ancora limitata ad una folta nicchia...) non ha dato affatto alla testa alle graziose Miriam e Johanna Eriksson Berhan. A quest'ultima cui abbiamo posto qualche domanda per conoscerle e farvele conoscere meglio: si parla del loro incontro con gli Efterklang, delle loro speranze, dei loro progetti a breve, del loro passato discografico, del sistema scolastico svedese e di favole...

Hi sweet twins! How are you? We're fine thank you. It's been raining here for a while but the summer weather seems to be on its way back.

I've really appreciated your work! Is it true that your project come to the light while you were preparing last year exam? Thank you! In Sweden we don't have like a last year exam, we have tests during the term. Some of the songs on the EP were written when we where in 8th & 9th grade, some of them were written during the terms last year.

What about your relationship with music before calling "taxi taxi!"? We were playing in some bands before TT!. There has always been a lot of music at home as well. Before we started to call us TT! we played in a band with our friends. But new songs came up that we wanted to do something else with, and not arrange with the whole band. So we decided to do them on our own.

Why did you choose to call your project "taxi taxi!"? When we had some songs recorded, we needed a name for our project. We didn't know that it was going to be our "band", so we chose to call it a project. A friend just came home from New York, maybe that's why we thought of taxis.

How did you meet Efterklang? Efterklang emailed us through our myspace last year, and wrote that they liked our two songs on our page, and asked if we were interested in releasing an EP on their label. We were, because we liked Efterklang, and had thought of releasing an EP, but we didn't felt 100% for the other labels that had contact us earlier.

Some writers argues that even if your music is enchanting, they say it's too plain. Are you going to contaminate it to encounter their tastes or not? It's hard to make everyone like your music when you're just two in the band. But sometimes we feel that it would be cool to have a drummer in Taxi Taxi!. Maybe that would be a good change. It's always rewarding to collaborate with other musicians and we want to do that a lot. The development has to come from yourself and not from the writers, so we don't read that much reviews.

Are you going to tour througout Europe? I think it's just London, Paris, Roskilde and Tromsø that's outside Sweden on our schedule right now… But yeah, hopefully throughout Europe soon enough.

Does it change anything when a composition is made by a couple of twins??? Does it affect the way of making music in a way or another? Maybe in a way that we understand each other most of the time, and we live together so we can always meet, or maybe that it is easier to tell each other what you like and what you don't about each others ideas, because we know what we think of each other in general.

Any work in progress? This summer we're going to do some touring and traveling, but after that, we thought of writing songs and maybe record a full album with new songs this fall.

A question I already forwarded to Amiina: what's your favourite fairy tale? Our favorite fairytale is "Millans märkvärdiga mormor", written by Antoinette Baker in 1969. The title means "Millan's peculiar grandma". It's about a little girl (Millan). One day she is sitting on the floor in an elevator crying and she cannot reach up to the button that can take her home. Suddenly she sees a button with the words "TO GRANDMA" written over it. And so the elevator takes her to a very peculiar lady that have many funny and strange things going on…