My Airwaves Discovery Of The Year: The Dandelion Seeds

For a few depraved souls, the off-off venue Kaffistofan was the ultimate
place to be on Airwaves Saturday. This venue was so underground it even
failed to make the Airwaves off-venue schedule. This small white house
on Hverfisgata used to serve free coffee to homeless people but a couple
of years ago it was taken over by art students who’ve used it as a
squat-slash-gallery.
Seeing that this event kept changing its starting time on Facebook its
pretty lucky that I actually got to see anything at all. The crowd
counted perhaps a total of twenty people (most of them moonshine
drinking teenagers), many of whom apparently dispersed after the rather
missable preceding performances. I just managed to catch The Dandelion Seeds,
a band previously known as Kid Twist. The name change apparently came
about when the band members discovered the apparent existence of a
famous rapper called Kid Twist. Their new name draws from the song
Dandelion Seeds by July, a British cult psych band, obviously a heavy
inspiration.
When the five fresh faced youngsters came on stage something quite
magical happened. These British invasion styled feedback rockers created
an amazing and all-encompassing wall of noise with sixties
psych-patterned videos overlaid on sixties soft porn and go go dancing
projecting in the background. The gallery space turned out to be a
magnificent venue, with plenty of space for the musicians and plenty of
walls for the sound to resonate from. If you mix up the British blues
invasion, the psych of UFO and Middle Earth with the eighties feedback
world of Spacemen 3 and Loop, and stir in a hefty dose of darkwave,
you’ll get The Dandelion Seeds.  How’s that for a wicked recipe? The
Dandelion Seeds do seem to live in their own little world of sixties
psychedelia but at least they’re doing something completely different
from anyone else playing Airwaves this year. They managed to create a
stunning show and a sonic explosion that will be hard to forget.