Collection: Apparat Organ Quartet
Apparat Organ Quartet. Hailing from Reykjavik, Iceland, they sometimes describe their music as „Machine Rock and Roll", and indeed the band’s sound veers between danceable floor-fillers and headbanging anthems, all served with a mixture of Kraftwerk-inspired electronics fused with Daft Punk-like Robot voices and hard-rock drumbeats with beautifully melancholic melodies soaring over the whole mix. Effortlessly switching between the dancefloor and the mosh-pit, AOQ at times sounds like a more danceable Motorhead - if they had been born in Düsseldorf and plugged Moogs into their Marshall amps instead of guitars. The band is not afraid to echo the epic grandeur of 70’s and 80’s stadium rock, but this is always tempered by the band’s metronomic Krautrock sensibilities.
Every note in Apparat Organ Quartet is hand-played, there is not a sequencer or computer in sight. In concert and on record, the band plays keyboards from their extensive collection of Jurassic analog machinery, including Russian synths and customized home organs, ARP’s, Farfisas, malfunctioning Hammonds, vocoders and various circuit-bent Casios and Portasounds.