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Röyksopp is an electronic music duo based in Bergen, Norway composed of Torbjørn Brundtland and Svein Berge. The group formed officially in 1998 and released their debut album Melody A.M. in 2001.
Despite the fact that Brundtland and Berge were schoolmates in their hometown of Tromsø and experimented with electronic instruments in the early 90's, Röyksopp only appeared years later when they met again in Bergen. The city was a vital scene for underground electronic music at this time, and the band worked with other Norwegian musicians such as Frost, Kings of Convenience’s guitarist/singer Erlend Øye, Those Norwegians and Drum Island in what was called the Bergen Wave. Their first singles were released by local independent label Tellé, and their album Melody A.M. on British label Wall of Sound. It spawned singles like "Eple", "Poor Leno", "Remind Me" and "Sparks".
The popularity of the duo’s album was boosted by several graphically experimental music videos. One of them, an infographic-styled video by French company H5 for the track "Remind Me", won the 2002 MTV Europe Music Award for best music video.
The song "Eple" was licensed by Apple for use as the welcome music to the company’s Mac OS X Panther operating system, playing the first time a user booted a new Mac. It was also used as the music for the title sequence for BBC World’s Click Online (now Click) and as background music during DJ talk on Virgin Radio. A small snippet of the song also is used for the station ID for American public television station KLRU, as well as for their identical production logo featured at the end of their productions such as Austin City Limits. "Eple", pronunciation per IPA: ['epl?], means "apple" in Norwegian.
Röyksopp's first single "So Easy" became popular in the UK after it was used in an T-Mobile advert.
The word Röyksopp is a stylized version of the Norwegian word for puffball, "røyksopp".
The Understanding was released on 12th July 2005, preceded by the single "Only This Moment" on 27th June, 2005. The video "Only This Moment" is closely based on the events of the Paris 1968 riots and elements of propaganda are found throughout the video clip. The album's second single, “49 Percent”, was released on 26th September, 2005. They also started to gain some fame on the other side of the Atlantic as "Follow My Ruin" was included on the soundtrack of FIFA 06, the 2005 edition of EA Sports' long-running football video-game franchise.
Their latest 1 disk album Back to Mine which came out in the US on March 5th 2007 and UK on April 27th 2007 is based on song of different artists.
Just like it was expected Back To Mine consists of upbeat, lively dance cover versions of widely various artists. The stylistics of tracks chosen by Röyksopp keeps to funk and electronic music of 80's representing a peculiar catalogue of those artists who has influenced Röyksopp music. The list of performers varies from such celebrities as "Talking Heads" and "Mike Oldfield" to less popular "Supermax". Each track is unique in its own way; sometimes beats and samples used by Röyksopp offer quite unexpected twists of mood within a certain song. However, Röyksopp tries to stick to reasonable limits keeping the flavor of 80's disco and sunshine of pure funk. As for the most felicitous songs, among the leaders there are definitely such tracks as Legs ("Art Of Noise") and Sphinx ("Harry Thamann") with its hypnotic voice. Dirty Talk (Klein and MBO) is really great too, it can be called a modern interpretation of 8 bit games melodies.
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