Well this is a first for NMC – music for children and babies!
Jens Hansen has paid us a visit twice before, in the duo Vi and his solo project Ådselæder and we had him marked down as an experimental type, with prog influences and perhaps with a hint of metal, too.
But this time he comes at us with an album of music written for children. It seems as if after the birth of his first child a few years ago he quickly grew tired of the children’s music that seemed to dominate the field, it being “either something hyper with weird, high-pitched vocals or simply white noise without any music at all.”
Now for my sins I used to watch Teletubbies, the British young kids’ TV series that was all the rage 20 years ago, four creatures that looked like aliens from the planet Zog and the ‘music’ was appalling, songs like ‘Say Eh Oh’, ‘Puddle Dance’ and ‘LA LA LA’; they were an insult to the children.
So I was hesitant to check out Jens’ music at first. But it was a revelation. Intelligent music for babies. IMB. Look, I started a new genre mummy.
What he’s done is to work to three givens:
1: The tempo must be slow, mimicking that of the maternal heartbeat sensed by infants in utero.
2: It must contain some sort of background ambience like rolling waves, a vacuum cleaner, a dishwasher, a cooker hood, etc. These sounds can accompany the music, but they can’t be too domineering.
3: Little ones love repetition – he had to cater to that.
The album is called ‘Baby, Please Stop Crying’ (as is his artist persona) and I’m pretty sure they will when they give it a listen. I selected the first track, the infant-focused ‘To the Nursery’ as an example and it has all the above but it’s the way he puts it together that is key – the child doesn’t have time to be bored before it goes off on another tack, but it comes back around on a loop, complete with ooh-oohs, cymbals and that heartbeat, to keep the continuity as well and especially the main theme (can we call it a riff?) which has the same attraction of that of an ice cream van’s tune.
There is clearly a knack to this and he’s found it straight away. If it can be bottled, I’d do it now and patent it.
I think we’ve got the ‘Revolver’, the ‘Purple Rain’, the ‘Pet Sounds’, the ‘Thriller’ of children’s music here.
Or perhaps the Bob Dylan, as the song sort of channels his ‘Baby stop crying’.
Find him on:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/babypleasestopcrying/
