Track-by-track: "Tivoli Invaliid"

"Tivoli Invaliid" is the opening track on Retrograd and one of the first tunes we started playing. It quickly became kind of a signature track in our early days. Despite its oompah feel when we perform it, the song was actually inspired by surf-rock bands like the Finnish group Laika & the Cosmonauts and the American band Man or Astro-Man? - artists I was drawing inspiration from at the time.

The tune is relatively simple and built around three parts: A, B, and C:

It's been twenty years since we released our debut album, "Retrograd." That was on October 5th, 2004. Time has a curious way of slipping by unnoticed until, suddenly, it stands before you, two decades tall, as a reminder of its fleeting existence. And it's good to get these reminders once in a while - to sit down and reflect on the path and the role we're playing in the bigger picture (not in the cosmic sense, but more culturally and socio-realistically). In that situation, I find myself astonished at how fast the years go by. How what feels like a handful of moments has stretched into twenty years, seven albums, and over 600 concerts.

Next weekend, on Friday the 14th of June, we’ll have the big honour of performing at this year’s Heartland Festival on the beautiful Fyn in Denmark. We’re playing at the Backroads Stage at 18:30, and we’ve prepared the best 60 minutes of Afenginn music that we could. It will be both salty and bitter and sweet and sweaty, bombastic and beautiful and sour and bastards, exhilarating and exhausting, thrilling and tranquil, chaotic and calming, unpredictable and unforgettable.

Last weekend we headed off the Esbjerg on the Danish west coast. For the third time, the fabulous Folk & Fæstival invited us to play at their festival. The Danish music magazine Gaffa was on the spot and gave us a great five-star review with the headline:

Spherical, spiritual, melancholic and life-affirming. Afenginn performed a memorable concert that contained all emotions and was almost spiritual!

We have some thrilling news to share with you. Yes, you read that correctly – there's new Afenginn music on its way, planned for release in 2024. This is an exciting chapter for our band, and we looking very much forward to reveal what’s cooking in the headquarter.

On September 29th we’ll be visiting Klaverfabrikken in Hillerød, Denmark with our only concert this autumn. When we started the band over 20 years ago, one of the first booking we got was at the venue Klaverfabrikken. Since then we’ve performed there multiple times. Now it’s been quite a while since last time and we’re looking very much forward being back!

We are overjoyed to share some great news with all of you - Afenginn has officially joined forces with the booking agency, Spectacle Music!

After some years of slightly lower live activity, where we’ve restructured, loaded up on new ideas and ambitions, this marks a significant and exciting milestone in our musical journey and road to supreme world domination.

On Friday the 3rd of February a group of 11 musicians from the Danish National Academy of Music will perform the Klingra album from beginning to end. This special performance will take place at Tobakken in Esbjerg as part of the Folk & Fæstival.

New year calls for a bit of tidying up in the storage. From now and until the 1st of February ALL orders from our webshop will be shipped free of charge all over the globe. Type in the code SALE23 at checkout and the shipping will be for free.

Next week is an exciting week here in Denmark. On Tuesday there’s a general election, where the outcome is supposedly quite uncertain. Although in the big picture it will probably be more or less business as usual afterwards anyway, regardless of whoever gets in the driver’s seat. But it’s exciting and what the news is all about these weeks.

Another thing that is not so much in the news, but nevertheless extremely exciting is that Afenginn will be performing live and giving one of our (since the pandemic meltdown) increasingly rare concerts. This is exciting and if you happen to be in a reasonable distance from the central-Zealand El Doradic Xanadu of Ringsted.

Our 2016 album OPUS has been sold out on vinyl for a while, but is now again available. We just got another delivery of them, and the German pressing plant seems to have been doing a very good job.

OPUS was highly acclaimed in national and international media and was awarded with four Danish Music Awards for Composer of the Year, Album of the Year and Live Act of the Year as well as the Carl Prisen for Best Roots Composer.

Since we started out, we've been having a newsletter coming out every now and then and it was a really nice way to connect directly with y'all through mail, and not necessarily having to be in the claws of various social media channels and algorithms and all that. We used to have an old typewriter, where people could sign up and took the trust quite seriously and putting a fair portion of effort into these letters.

Then a few years ago I accidentally deleted our complete mailing list due to some kind of brainslip clusterfuck. Not more “accidentally” though than that I, with the determination that would’ve made a psychotic beaver jealous, wrote “PERMANENTLY DELETE” (all caps and everything)

…