There is an air of mystery about Fake Mannequin which is a Danish duo consisting of Amy Horn and Tor Laurens.
Both heavily versed in the music industry already they met one summer’s day at the Copenhagen harbour and quickly began exchanging musical ideas. As you do. And phone numbers? Who knows? We aren’t party to that.
The duo’s band name is a conundrum in its own right, as a mannequin is already classed as fake so in this alternative world a fake one should be something that is actually real even if it doesn’t look it.
Someone alert Deckard. We might have replicants in the house!
When they first came together in the studio, the songs took shape almost wordlessly, as if they intuitively understood each other’s quirks and quiddities. As it should be.
She has an electro-pop background while he is a composer and producer and what they conjured up is a melange of synth-pop, dark electronic pop and trip-hop.
I’ve never been a great fan of the latter with the single exception of one Massive Attack song – I’m sure you know which one – and that’s the standard against which I judge others.
And to be fair they’ve made a pretty good fist of ‘Same Tree’, their debut single from a so far untitled album to be released in May, introducing a duality of hardness and softness, mechanical yet pliable, which pervades the song and by all accounts the album, too.
That tree has many branches but they all stem from the same trunk. We are two but also we are one.
Taking that philosophy a stage further those branches also reach out in different directions and that is where the rift has grown in a relationship but without it actually collapsing; merely hanging in space with no common connection left – but still it lingers on.
Personal yet universal.
The imagery is very visual to me. I’ve been fascinated by tree allegory since reading Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë at university, especially Brontë’s split chestnut tree symbol in Jane Eyre, representing the doomed nature of Jane and Mr Rochester’s first, illicit engagement and foreshadowing their future.
Then I think of the seminal performance of Peter Gabriel’s ‘Blood of Eden’ during his Secret World Tour in 1992, with an irreconcilable Gabriel and Paula Cole – Adam & Eve – stood polarised on each side of the Tree of Life until he reaches out to touch her back lightly as the final bar of the song fades away.
So Fake Mannequin is in very good company with this imagery.
Indeed, the sharp lyricism would fit that scenario, too as demonstrated in the repeated chorus:
“Although we’re heading different ways/We’re growing from the same tree
Although our shapes are shifting/We’re still made out of the same wood
From the same tree”.
Musically there’s an ethereal, fantastical, ghostly nature to the track as there often is to the trip-hop style (at least to my ears).
All in all a very promising debut song.
Continues after the Spotify link).
Find them on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61586706158253&sk=about
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fakemannequinmusic/
