Let me tell you how I found out about Detektivbyrån and their sweet, precious music. It started with a boring evening and me managing to stumble across some site called thesixtyone.com. It has all the bells and whistles of a music social network – think of last.fm – plus something that makes the experience more interesting: quests. You get quests that involve you listening to some songs after different patterns, e.g. to listen to seven songs released under the Creative Commons license. So, I was playing around that site and accidentally found Detektivbyrån, a Swedish band formed from Anders “Flanders” Molin and Martin “MacGyver” Molin. The song that turned my face into a big, wide smile and made me search for more info and more music of this band like a crazed junkie, is E18. I listened to it on repeat for one hour and it made me think about Yann Tiersen and the movie called “Le fabuleux destin d’Amelie Poulain“. After some little research, I’ve discovered that this movie had a real influence in their work from from Wikipedia, where you can find out more about the prizes they won, on which soundtracks they were featured and which commercials used their music.

Snipping scissors, toy pianos, mechanical clocks, xylophones and accordions manage to get you into a world where you’re free to dream, where worries and problems are absent. You just smile and imagine that all your dreams will come true, that there’s a beautiful future waiting for you. This kind of music is exactly what you need when you’re feeling down, it convinces you to make a few more steps on the path called “life”. Through Detektivbyrån’s music you travel to a country of innocence, in a marzipan town where everything is fragile, sweet and where you have a house on the seashore (“Hus Vid Havet”). From this house you can see the waves crashing into the shore with the rhythm offered by a mechanical clock, rhythm defined by a Demiurge obsessed with music and perfect beauty.

Detektivbyrån (The Detective Agency) have released two full-length albums till now – Wermland and E18 Album -, both released in 2008. If I compare their music with Yann Tiersen’s music, I could say that theirs doesn’t have as many layers as the latter’s music. Detektivbyrån’s music tends towards simplicity, minimalism and the general feeling it sends out to me is “innocence”, “remember how life was when you were a child”.