For 10 years, while Sebastian Dalmar and Joachim Schiødt both worked in record stores, they were competing about who could find the most obscure and quirky old Danish records. In 2019 they finally decided to join forces and make the most out of their weird records together. The merge resulted in the mixtape Tag Denimvesten På – Dansk Country A-Å and the sequel Sæt Tiden I Stå – Dansk Disco A-Å. On their mixes they combine undiscovered gems and old, iconic Danish tunes. Since the release of the country mixtape they’ve been playing all over Copenhagen and beyond.
Can you tell us a little bit about how HEJ LEIF and how it started?
Back in 2018/19, we were both dank record collectors in the periphery of the Danish DJ-scene – we were both approached by DJ-sensei Stefan Storm who thought we’d be a beautiful couple with our shared passion for Danish obscurities. Since then we’ve played almost 100 gigs together where we share our love for weird old Danish stuff with as wide an audience as possible. In all modesty, we think we succeeded with the latter.
B. In 2021 you released the mixtape “Tag Denimvesten på – Dansk Country fra A-Å” and since then, it has gained more than 30.000 plays on Soundcloud – that’s pretty iconic! What was your motivation to do this kind of mix?
A lot of our records are not available online so we wanted to share them for a wider audience than just the people who showed up at our monthly bar gig at H15. The natural choice was to make a mixtape. At the time, country was very hip amongst the youth so we thought we’d gather a load of schlager records and call it country – even though it’s a very wide take on the genre. This made all the Vesterbro hipsters fall in love with us. But the hip hoppers liked the drum breaks, the reggae heads liked the fast paced juggling mix style, the punk rockers liked the anti-authoritan lyrics and in that way it had a quite wide appeal that we were proud of. Also, it was released at the peak of covid so people really had nothing better to do than to sit at home and listen to our weird old schlager records.
C. What did you have in mind when curating this new playlist?
Our dogma is to only play music in Danish or Danish instrumental music. Primarily from before the arrival of the CD. This narrows the field of electronic music quite a bit. So this playlist is just as wide a take on genre “Electronica” as our mixtapes are on country and disco. We’ve collected some older Danish songs from artists that we love playing like Elisabeth, Anne Linnet and Seebach but also we’ve included some Danish oddball electronica from the last 20 years that we don’t normally play in our vinyl-only sets. We’ve tried to keep the playlist rather obscure and even though it include names like TV-2 and Lars H.U.G. on there, we hope you’ll still listen with an open heart and hear that even the most commercially successfull artists of the 80’s made some leftfield tunes that smell a bit of electronica. You might widen your musical horizon!
For more news about HEJ LEIF, their gigs and iconic mixtapes check out Instagram and Soundcloud