Monday the 21st of May 2012 the Norwegian dj Rune Lindbæk and GramArt, the artist organisation that is representing him, filed a complaint to the district court of Bergen, Norway. The complaint states that Lindbæk wants to be credited as a co-writer of two songs from Röyksopp's debut album "Melody A.M." The two songs are "A Higher Place" and "40 Years Back/Come".
This conflict has been going on over 6 years most of the time behind the scenes, but made public in March 2011 when the Norwegian paper Dagens Næringsliv featured the case/situation over 10 pages (short summary in Norwegian can be found here). The peice was written mostly from Linbæk's point of view, to great irritation for Torbjørn Brundtland and and Svein Berge. 8 months later (even it is dated 20.04.12) Röksopp answers the article by publishing a 45 pages letter (written in Norwegian) on royksoppsvarer.com. Few days later Lindbæk answer this letter by writing a blog post on runelindbaek.com.
The picture above is taken from a time when things probably seemed to be better (photo taken from runelindbaek.com). So what did this conversation through the media and web really tell us (especially for people that dont master the Norwegian language that well)? Well, there are these two songs that was made in the Drum Island (Lindbæk, Brundtland and Ole Mjøs) period, and then developed by Röyksopp and released on their hugely successful debut album. To cut it short (if I should mention all the twist and turns in this case this post would be 10 times as long), the quarrel its about if Rune Lindbæk was part of the creative process and of course - money!!
MToK do not want to take any side in this conflict, but was it really necessary to do your dirty laundry in public? On the other hand a court case might be for the best, since everything else seems to have failed, so the record (or rather tunes) finally can be set straight...
röyksopp's "a higher place" caused most of this controversy since it has some similarities to drum island's "lift"...
...which again has a resemblance to the beginning of jean-michel jarre's "wooloomooloo"...
