Contemporary Composers play
Love Ballads vol. 1

H å k a n L i d b o | S t e f a n K l a v e r d a l

Contemporary Composers Play Love ballads Vol. 1

Håkan Lidbo & Stefan Klaverdal

True Love Records 2015

What is good taste? Why do some the music taste change for some people from simple pop tunes to complex avant garde – while others still continue to listen to the music of their childhood wile grown up. Why do some people constantly seek new impressions and challenges while others only feel safe when they are still in the context they already know?

Is it to do with the soul of the music? Some people seek the maximum emotional expression all the time, while others seek the sublime. Is it about heritage or environment? How can we listen so differently?

The value of music is constantly shifting. The latest thing for one year can quickly grow old and become an embarrassment, then become rediscovered by collectors many years later, get a kind of kitschy quality and then reused and become the latest thing again.
This however, does not apply to all music. Some songs where so rich and brimming with emotion while newly released that they can never again become the latest thing again. They describe love with such predictable clichés, so one-dimensional, that they can never be rediscovered by collectors to get their honour reinstated. The cheesiest love ballads of pop history.

The composers Håkan Lidbo and Stefan Klaverdal share a fascination for bad taste and the codes of conduct that define the borders of high or low culture. Stefan has made ballet for deliberately bad dancers. Håkan wrote songs for the Eurovision song contest.

Contemporary Composers Plays Love Ballads Vol 1 is a kind of musical regression therapy where the two composers engage in a quest to redefine, process and change the cheesiest love songs of pop history, with the goal to distil some essence of black or depth in these otherwise so shallow classic ballads. In some cases the process can be described as a deconstruction, sometimes a distillation and sometimes as a brutal slaughter of the original.

Since the copyright does not allow composers to freely and easily interpret an already recorded material in this way the CD is not released commercially. The interested can instead download it from SoundCloud:

https://soundcloud.com/lidboklaverdal/sets/contemporary-composers-play

Stefan Klaverdal has made a walking concert at IKEA, two operas about weaving, performances for meditating audience and much more.
www.stefanklaverdal.com

Håkan Lidbo has made music for aliens, solo piece for the much hated football horn, the vuvuzela, tricked the monkeys at Skansen to play synth and much more.
http://hakanlidbo.com