One year with Spacelab

Spacelab has already survived its first year. Time has a curious habit of accelerating when your weekends are measured in BPM instead of calendar pages, and when most of your wardrobe is black.

To celebrate the occasion, brothers Christer and Lars Björndahl turned Henriksberg into a temple of electronic music, filling its different floors with everything from melodic synthpop to harder electronic beats. It felt less like an anniversary and more like a reunion of Gothenburg’s alternative family.

Thermostatic doing their first gig ever.

The evening opened with the live debut of local act Thermostatic. Calling it a debut is slightly misleading, though, since the musicians themselves are anything but newcomers. Johannes Hedberg and Daniel Vadestrid are already well known through Carbon Based Lifeforms and other projects, while Louise and Peter Marchione have long been familiar faces on the scene. Together the happy quartet delivered an infectious set of bright, energetic bitpop that immediately won over the crowd.

Hype on stage.

Next came Robert Enforsen with his new band Hype. The performance was solid and confident, but comparisons with Elegant Machinery were unavoidable. That’s both the blessing and the curse of having been part of a legendary act, as every new chapter is measured against the previous. Still, Hype showed enough promise to make me curious about what would come next.

The lineup was rounded off by Michigan and Colony 5, completing a remarkably strong evening from beginning to end.

If this anniversary was any indication of where Spacelab was heading, Gothenburg’s electronic scene had every reason to be optimistic. Here’s hoping this was only the first of many birthdays to celebrate.