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Vice Blog

Stockholm – Glass Grass

Virginia Beach art collective Dearraindrop have a show opening in Stockholm this Friday, and Träd, Gräs och Stenar are playing live! Dearraindrop are artists Joe, Laura and Billy, and engineers Owen and Christopher, and together they make beautiful, eye-catching art pieces…

They have built musical instruments that are affected by the colours that surround them, and once they made a walk-in instrument in the shape of a sphinx. The entrance was its throat, in the belly you could bang the ribs to make music and the sounds were transformed into images that shot out through its mouth and onto a screen. It's basically what toys for adults really should be like…

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VICE: How come Träd, Gräs & Stenar will be playing at your opening party?
Laura: It's because the name of the show is "Concrete TREES, Glass GRASS and Cream-filled STONES." Loyal asked them to play and they said yes.

But how did you hear about them?
Joe: I've been into old Swedish music for a long time. You know, old electronic music and psych rock. I had the Vild I Skogen compilation on Silence and then just went on to spend all my college government money finding more stuff. It's like a dream come true to come to Sweden and see a band like that.
Laura: Joe has the biggest record collection ever. I'll just tell him "Put on the hits, put on the hits" and he'll do it.

Like a jukebox!
Laura: Yeah. We listen to music when we draw, and sometimes we watch TV too - stuff like Seventh Heaven. We cringe but we still watch it. Sometimes TV can be inspirational.
Owen: We're inspired by Carl Sagan, the astronomer who wrote the book "Murmurs of Earth." And Voyager, the spacecraft that brought sounds and images from earth to outer space in the form of radio signals—they want it to reach potential alien civilizations. And experimental electronic music.

What's this I hear about you getting kicked out of a gallery in Chicago?
Joe: There's a lot of stuff about us on the internet that isn't true. That really did happen though, but it wasn't like us saying… you know… "Fuck people."
Laura: It was the kid Joe was with who said that.
Joe: I just made a farting sound.

With your… mouth?
Joe: Yeah. And then they came and poured away all our beer.
Laura: We were bummed because we had just turned 21, so we were allowed to drink it.
Joe: I think they were nervous because we had played with our band at a party the night before, and it got really wild. It was on the second floor and the floor almost caved in from all the jumping. We went downstairs to check and there was a big crack all through the roof of the first floor.
Laura: It was really wild. People were naked. There's a photo of it in the Party Issue, but you can't tell that it's me because I have a crocodile mask on.

Träd, Gräs och Stenar plays live, and Concrete Trees, Glass Grass and Cream-Filled Stones opens at Loyal in Stockholm, Sweden on Friday, October 20.