Music
Infographic: What makes GOAT tick
Discover the influences and inspirations that define the spectacularly bizarre Swedish seven-piece.
GOAT: Sweden's oddest band
© GOAT
Sweden’s GOAT are a live-music phenomenon. A clattering stampede of garage rock, disco fever, cosmic funk and all sorts of world music, performed by a whirling-dervish-like seven-piece dressed up in tribal costumes and pagan masks. Yes, you read that correctly.
There are other scintillatingly odd bands at Coachella 2014, including Flatbush Zombies, Bo Ningen, The Internet and Future Islands, but GOAT are, by some distance, the most intensely entertaining of the lot. They also have the best backstory of any musical act since Sun Ra claimed to have arrived from Saturn.
In the grand tradition of rock ’n’ roll myth-making, the band – comprised of a core of three, plus more casual members of the collective – hail from a Swedish village called Korpilombolo. The village, they claim with more than a whiff of mischief, has been a stronghold for Voodoo worship since a travelling witch doctor and hangers-on arrived in the village centuries ago.
The village was burned down by suspicious outsiders, or so the story goes, but survivors returned to rebuild it and reintroduce the Voodoo powers, which, say GOAT, fuels their music.
Their 2012 debut, World Music, was an intoxicating brew of psychedelic music that takes in Funkadelic’s raucous grooves, squalling garage punk, acid folk, Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat and Can’s lolloping Krautrock. It was hailed to the heavens and now the band have just signed to America’s most famous indie label, Sub Pop.
To celebrate the band’s brief sojourn into the real world with shows at Coachella and (later in the summer) Bonnaroo, we tracked down one of the band’s mysterious leaders, Goatman, to help us get to grips with what makes his unique band tick.
What makes GOAT tick
© Christian Schalauka/RedBull.com
First on the list is the music that gets them moving. The answer to that is predictably unpredictable and includes jazz master John Coltrane, legendary Hindustani classical musician Raghunath Seth and balls-to-the-wall punks Discharge.
Says Goatman: “Though this lot vary in sound and range, for me they represent the freedom of expression. The ability to create from the authorless place which we all do anyway, where all things appear and dissolve. To not edit and re-edit every single thing a thousand times but just go with the flow.”
Their freethinking, freewheeling vision is at the fore in everything they do. It’s in their choice of reading material (“Jag tänker ofta på Celine – I often think about Celine, or any other book by [Swedish beat writer] Sture Dahlström, because he was a genius and he makes me laugh”) and in their philosophy of life: “We share the same vast mind and although the content might differ and everyone is truly unique, in the end we are all the same. One. Anything that benefits humanity as a whole in my opinion would count as a good philosophy.”
And the place that inspires them most? Earth, silly. “This is where I reside at the time being and it’s just great,” says Goatman.
Mix together all of this – free jazz, eternal optimism, beat poetry, hardcore punk – and you get the heady soup that is GOAT music. Enjoy.