Electronova

This CD from the Norwegian music project Homeless Balloon has 74 minutes of down tempo, positive electronica, moody chill out beats, some really dark and deep ambient tracks and even a couple of avant-garde pieces. A limited stock of the CD comes with a nice Digipak cover. A digital booklet with images, information about the recording, the instruments and the artist, can be downloaded free from the official artist page of Homeless Balloon. Homeless Balloon is the music project of Norwegian composer and artist Helge Krabye, who was born 1953 in Oslo. He has composed music for more than eighty television documentaries, radio plays, fantasy stories and art projects as well as more than a hundred signature melodies and musical jingles. In his music, he is known for combining acoustic instruments with experimental, electronic sounds, and for building strong melodies. Helge Krabye's first instrument was a small, wooden zither that his grandmother gave him when he was four years old. At six, he started taking violin lessons and later began playing first violin in Nordtvet Skoles Strykeorkester in Oslo. His teacher Peter Hindar (well known for his performances with Hindarkvartetten) encouraged him to practice more, but he didn't have the patience. One day Peter Hindar caught him in cheating; he didn't read the music, he played it by memory and by ear... That was the end of one era, but the beginning of another. When Helge Krabye was 15, big boys were supposed to play guitar, not violin - and he quit the school orchestra. His grandmother gave him a violin, so he never really got rid of it... He took up the violin again after high school, encouraged by his friend Vegard Brenna who played piano. Since then, he has often used violin in his recordings. With the Tandberg 1200X tape recorder he bought for the money he received at his Confirmation, Helge Krabye started composing music and creating new sounds. Very much inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen and the Beatles, he developed an ear for sound. He was able to dub his guitar with noises and voices from the radio. One of the first compositions was 'Song of the world', a montage of acoustic guitar, radio tuning and voice samples like Mr. Richard Nixon announcing the end of the Vietnam War and an overexited radio dj announcing the (terrible) movie 'Song of Norway'. Music meant a lot to Helge Krabye as a teenager, and he bought a lot of LP's and even made his own listening charts every week. He discovered 'Astral Week' by Van Morrison, 'Inner Mounting Flame' by John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, 'What's going on' by Marvin Gaye, the experimental music of Karheinz Stockhausen and Terry Riley, as well as Mozart's 'Symphony No. 40' with the great conductor Carlo Maria Giulini. After high school, he went to technical school in NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Cooperation) to become a sound engineer. Here he was able to use professional recording studios and instruments, and he played guitar with his classmates. With a class mate, he was responsible for the innovative radio program 'Lydbåndmix' ('Music Tapes') where amateur musicians were invited to send in their own musical compositions. Several later to be well known, musicians and singers were among the artists who were discovered through the program. Later, Helge met Arnfinn Christensen, who became a close friend, and who jumped in as program host with Helge in the next series of 'Lydbåndmix'. Arnfinn also played instruments and made his own music. He o