ROLL ARTIC

The Norwegian record industry just didn't warm to electro-pop two-piece Röyksopp. Luckily they found favour in Britain and their debut album shifted a million copies. Jim Carroll went to Bergen to find out how Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland came in from the cold

APPEARANCES can be deceptive. Walking around Bergen on a Wednesday afternoon, you'd be hard-pressed to find any pop magic in the air. Instead, you end up doing what all visitors to this cosy Norwegian town do at some stage of their trip and follow a well-beaten trail from pillar to post.

It starts at the fish market and leads to the Bryggen, the 900-year-old waterfront with its distinctive, neatly stacked wooden buildings. Once you've had your fill of sitting in the sun watching boats shipping sightseers out to the fjords, you can then take the funicular to the top of Mount Floyen for another view of the town. If you have the time, patience and inclination, you can then do it all over again. Other than a poster plugging a future visit by Final Countdown hair-metal clowns Europe, Bergen's musical charms remain resolutely hidden.

Well, the local tourist board will point you towards Troldhaugen, the house to the south of Bergen which the great 19th-century composer Edvard Grieg once called home, but that's not what you're looking for.

It seems that the Bergen which has nurtured and developed a community of high-profile pop acts over the last eight years, including Annie, Kings of Convenience, Magnet, Ralph Myers, Sondre Lerche and Tellé Records, is not yet on any tourist map. The city may be firmly on the radar of most record labels keen to get their own taste of future-proof Nordic pop, but the participants and producers remain largely unknown and unheralded at home.

It's no surprise, then, that the eating and drinking continues unabated in the Spisekroken restaurant when Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland walk in and wait for a table. A quick glance sees two scruffy young men in need of a shave and some sleep. A second glance reckons that there's more happening on the big plates heading towards each table. A third glance is directed towards the dessert menu.

The only two Norwegians in Bergen tonight who have sold a million copies of their debut album sit down and order dinner. Friends and accomplices since they first met as 10-year-olds in the far northern town of Tromso, they now finish each other's sentences and redirect any wrong turns in the conversation. Berge seems to have more to say, but this may be because Brundtland is the only one at the table tucking into a starter.

The reason why Röyksopp are dining with The Irish Times is a new album called The Understanding. Going to those places their best-selling Melody AM debut from 2001 did not take in, The Understanding is an album of pristine 21st-century electro-pop tunes and shimmering, sublime ambient textures. There's plenty of shade and shadows, but there are also many moments like Only This Moment and Alpha Male which sweep everything into bright sunlight.

"We knew what we didn't want and that was a good starting point," says Berge. "We wanted people to be surprised and we didn't want them to think about Melody AM. We could have done loads of tracks like So Easy from the first album, but you need to show the world a bit of diversity. You also want to make it interesting for yourselves as well as for everyone else."

It was a similar spirit that brought Röyksopp to Bergen in the first place. "We heard it was a friendly place so we moved here to check it out," says Berge. "In Tromso, we were used to people talking rather than doing. Here, it was the other way around. People were energetic and enthusiastic and doing things. You didn't have that awful atmosphere when competition turns sour."

They arrived in 1997, a time when the city was full of music makers and brimming with possibilities. "People here were just beginning to work out if they could make a living from doing music," recalls Brundtland. "There was a whole gang of people in their late teens and early twenties who wanted it to work, a community of people like Björn Torske, Annie, the Tellé label and Tore Kroknes. They knew each other, they recognised that there was talent here and they wanted to find a way through for everyone."

Back then it was a case of all hands on deck. "We'd do parties and then use the money to press limited-edition, seven-inch records in the Czech Republic," says Berge. "We'd use these records to raise awareness of what we were about. It was very hard to get the economic backing from banks and the usual financial sources to expand and develop, so we had to look at other ways to get on a professional footing."

For Röyksopp, this meant signing to UK label Wall of Sound (and later to EMI). Despite demos of Melody AM sitting on the desk of every big Norwegian record company for months, no one in their home country was prepared to take a chance on them. A million sales later, they can afford to shrug their shoulders about what happened back then.

"The Norwegian industry thinks we were lucky," says Berge with a smile. "They think we emerged fully formed at the age of 24. They don't know what we did before Melody AM. We know Norwegian musical history, so we know we are an exception. There's only A-Ha and Lene Marlin, I think, in terms of pop acts from here who have had the same sales abroad."

The cold-shouldering may have to do with the fact that the bulk of Norway's music industry is based in Oslo. So it rarely pays much attention to what's happening elsewhere in the country, even in the creative underground hothouses of Bergen.

But such a scenario suits Röyksopp in many ways. "We don't care about getting our pictures taken or being in the papers and we don't want to live in Oslo. Because of this, we're deemed to be unpredictable and eccentric and evasive." Berge smiles again. "Maybe we're semi-eccentric."

Other interviews with the pair would lead you to think that this might well be the case. Many journalists have attributed the tangents and absurdities which punctuate Röyksopp interviews to wry Norwegian humour, but Brundtland offers another explanation. "Normally when we do interviews, we're in a hotel and seem to be on a conveyor belt and we're expected to come up with standard rock interview answers every time. So we go into the room and try to entertain ourselves, which is why our interviews are so hard to figure out, even for us."

Being part of a promotional chain gang was one of the new experiences which came in the wake of that debut album. "You have to say yes to things you haven't done before so you can have new experiences," believes Berge. "Making an album, that was new. Answering the same questions over and over again, that was also new. Going on the road, we hadn't done that before, so we said let's do that too.

"We found that those rock cliches are all so true. We enjoyed being onstage, but the whole circus that goes with it is another thing entirely. We could have done without that."

Yet the more they toured, the more copies of Melody AM were sold. The band may not have had any early expectations beyond getting the album released, but even they were surprised by its success. While neither are prepared to make any predictions about the new album (Berge wryly hopes it will sell at least one more copy than the last so it can be deemed a success), they do recognise that much has changed in the past four years.

"It's gratifying that Melody AM did so well because now we can eat in this nice restaurant instead of eating mashed potatoes every night," says Berge, waving a hand at the surroundings. "That was all we ate when we were recording the debut - mashed potatoes. Of course, now we are both getting fatter as a result of all this fine food, so this album will probably be seen as our fat album."

Such weight gain will, thankfully, not lead to any other rock star excesses.They remain comfortable with Bergen and its relative isolation. "It suits us to be up here away from everything," says Brundtland. "I think if we lived in London or Oslo, we would both be easy targets for people selling new trends and things. I think we're both suckers for that kind of thing, be it music or T-shirts or sneakers. The DJ culture of the 1990s played a big part in our lives, so we easily flit from one new thing to the next new thing all the time."

Berge points out that the desire for new sounds has probably played a huge role in the new album's mix of sounds and styles. "That search for the new is part of our musical heritage and it shows, especially on this album. It's all over the place. We're not getting lost in a one-track thing and we find that we're more likely to find new sounds by fucking things up."

This quest for something new has always been there. Back in Tromso as kids, it was always about new experiences. They played music, then took photographs, then made short films and then produced magazines which they hawked on the streets.

"But music was the thing we always came back to . . . " says Brundtland. "Music and crank calls," adds Berge. " . . . You'd hear these weird sounds by someone like Kraftwerk and you wouldn't know what they were. But they'd stick in your memory and you'd always be thinking about them."

Those sounds and noises re-emerged when they began working on their own music in Bergen. They'd remember how they felt when they heard The Robots and strive for similar "eureka" moments of their own. Sometimes, you know, they actually got there.

"We have always been experimenting with music and especially house music, which has very set rules about what to do and not to do," says Berge. "We decided to mess with the rules to come up with something which would be seen as our own sound, our own music. It has worked well to date, so I don't think that's ever going to change for us."

The Understanding is released on July 1st. Röyksopp play the Electric Picnic, Stradbally, Co Laois on September 3rd