Getting to Know… Mondo Bear | Interview 🎤

Intriguing Norwegian rock band Mondo Bear provides some awesome insight on the 66^th interview in the Getting to Know series on The Musical Hype.  

“We create songs that send you on a musical trip, combining atmospheric, relaxing and harmonic guitars with grounding, heavy bass, worth rewinding over and over again.” Ah, definitely sounds like the perfect means to rock any audience’s socks off! We are quite lucky to have Norwegian Mondo Bear rock band serve as the interviewees on the 66^th interview of the Getting to Know… series on The Musical Hype.

As always, the collective provides some awesome insight into their craft, including the aforementioned excerpt from the response to our standard opening question.  Providing a little bit more background before digging in, how about listing the personnel of Mondo Bear?  That would include Erik Skjaanes (vocals and guitar), Sondre Kotsbakk (bass), Anders Jordbrekk (guitar), and Vebjørn Numme (drums).  Without any further ado or delay, let’s jump right into Getting to Know… Mondo Bear: Interview #66!

Brent Faulkner, The Musical Hype: Let’s get this started off right. For those who may not be familiar with Mondo Bear, what would you say makes your band distinct or unique? How do you rock the audience’s socks off?  

Mondo Bear: We are a rock band rooted in psychedelia and progressive rock. As our influences would suggest, we write long, riff-heavy and driving atmospheric music, but still with a touch of pop-sensibility. The result is a sound somewhere between fuzzed out psychedelia, alternative, and classic rock. We create songs that send you on a musical trip, combining atmospheric, relaxing and harmonic guitars with grounding, heavy bass, worth rewinding over and over again.

Faulkner: Okay, let’s explore some juicy backstories. How did Mondo Bear form and what were some of the goals or the visions you had as a band early on?  

Mondo Bear: Mondo Bear as a project began sometime in 2018, as the culmination of another project by our drummer Vebjorn and singer/guitarist Erik. With two new members, Anders on guitar and Sondre on bass, we quickly started writing these longer, slow songs. Most of the process was taking song ideas and adding some kind of ambience and atmosphere to them.

Using different effects to carve out a sound that we felt happy with. We knew early on that we wanted to create an album, and not release EPs, because we felt our music both needed some time to polish and refine, but also, since some of our songs are quite long, they fit the album format quite well. “H, as in Hollywood” is a collection of the first songs we wrote together that we thought sounded good enough for an album. It’s an amalgam of our different tastes in music.

Faulkner: Let’s talk more about goals.  Have your goals or your perspectives changed since first starting out? What do your aspirations or goals look like now?

Mondo Bear: When we first started out, we were just having fun, jamming and trying to find each other rhythmically. Finding our sound took a while, but eventually we realized that we all brought something different to the table, and ending up with a mixture of psychedelic rock, indie-pop vocals and heavy riffs. The present Mondo Bear is more focused on making great music to bring into a live performance, compared to the version of Mondo Bear when we first started out. Back then we just tried to create something together, we still do each and every day, but now we feel like we make music with a purpose. Our rehearsal space is shut down due to the outbreak of COVID-19 in Norway. This means we have plenty of time to record and polish songs before going into the studio, hopefully by the end of 2020.

Faulkner: Everybody is influenced by somebody else. Who would you consider some of your biggest musical influences and how are they influential?

Mondo Bear: Most of our influences are the greats of the 60s and 70s. The more contemporary stuff is quite varied. Erik, our singer/guitarist has an affection for Lana Del Ray and Pink Floyd while the rest of the band is into anything from old school heavy metal to jazz, krautrock, fusion, soul/R&B. It is hard to pick our “biggest” musical influence, but if we had to pick one Tame Impala would be a strong contender. The creative mind of Kevin Parker and how he creates such amazing immersive music is beyond me.

Faulkner: Ah, the fun stuff.  What’s your craziest tour story or the wackiest thing that’s happened during a performance?  Feel free to be creative.

Mondo Bear: Wireless transmitters grant us the opportunity to move around more freely; on stage, and in the crowd. We played a small festival in our hometown; our stage was in the alley between a restaurant and an apartment complex. Tightly packed crowd enjoying our music, and during the guitar solos of “Control” (from our record “H, as in Hollywood), our bassist runs through the crowd and takes a seat on an empty chair behind the crowd, before joining the crowd for the outro. It is really fun interacting with the crowd by catching eyes with the crowd in front or joining in.

Faulkner: Up until this point in your career, what would you describe as your favorite song you’ve recorded or performed live? What makes that song special?

Mondo Bear: I want to give two answers, one for live performances and one from our debut album. In the studio, we love to add tons of tracks with extra harmonies, percussion and synths. A good example of this is the title track “Hollywood”. On Hollywood we used a 1960s Hammond B3 to create this heavenly choir for the song’s chorus. Both during recording and when listening back to it, it still produces chills and goosebumps making it a definite favorite of mine.

For our live performances, the song that resonates best with the audience is “Control”. It is this 8-minute musical trip that brings people into a certain mood, dancing and just vibing the whole way through it. When playing it live, the song assumes a more jammed version of itself, which is also why it is one of the hardest songs to play perfectly.

Faulkner: Is there anything else awesome, cool, or left of center the world should know about you? Secret talents or surprising tidbits?

Mondo Bear: Both our guitarists have large pedalboards filled with a lot of different effects, and to keep track of all those and more importantly, engage and disengage them at the right time requires some tap dancing. Maybe their secret talent would be that they could be quite proficient tap dancers if they had to?

Faulkner: Closing this thing out, what is you/your band currently working on, promoting that you can share with us or want us to know about? We love secrets, but there’s no pressure.   

Mondo Bear: We released our debut album H, as in Hollywood back in February, be sure to give that a listen or 10, and let us know what you think. Right now, COVID-19 is rampant, and all stages and bars have been shut down, so all concerts we were planning as promo for our record unfortunately got cancelled. Right now, we are writing songs for our next record, we have a few songs already tested live. We are planning on going into the studio at the end of 2020, stay tuned!

Facebook • Instagram • Spotify: (H, as in Hollywood)

Faulkner: Thank you so much for taking the time to answer these questions, and best of luck moving forward. 

Photo Credits: High Ten, Mondo Bear, Brent Faulkner, The Musical Hype