Biography
Röyksopp is an electronic music duo from Norway composed of Torbjørn Brundtland and Svein Berge. The group formed officially in 1998 and released their debut album Melody A.M. in 2001.
Brundtland and Berge were schoolmates in their hometown of Tromsø, Norway experimenting with electronic instruments in the early 90s. However, the duo did not appear as Röyksopp until years later when they met again in Bergen, Norway. 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.
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The word Röyksopp is a stylized version of the Norwegian word for the puffball mushroom, "røyksopp" or literally "smoke mushroom".
Röyksopp's first single's were released by local independent label Tellé, and their album Melody A.M. on British label Wall of Sound. It spawned the singles "Eple", "Poor Leno", "Remind Me" and "Sparks".
The popularity of the duo’s music 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. In this same event the duo was nominated in 3 more categories: "Best Nordic Act", "Best New Artist" and "Best Dance Act", but only won the award for best video. The duo performed the song "Poor Leno"[citation needed] at the event.
Many Röyksopp tracks have been used in commercials or as background music in television programs. 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" means "apple" in Norwegian. Several songs including Circuit Breaker, Only This Moment were used in an episode in the Danish Television's consumer programme, named Rabatten.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.
