Existensminimum makes dayglo electro-pop, likened to DJ Shadow meets Spiritualized meets XTC meets Seefeel. A sparkling set of vocal and instrumental tracks ranging from blissed-out full-on orchestrations and romantic crooner trips to anxious, deconstructed rock… Existensminimum’s posh orch-pop arrangements are bedecked with a kitchen sink sonic palette: strings and horns, guitars and keys, beats and breaks, bleeps and bloops…
Anyone who has experienced Existensminimum on stage knows that you can’t get any wilder than Magnus Henriksson. If there are pipes in the ceiling he’s bound to hang from them sooner or later, making guttural sounds as the mike will be stuck in his mouth, until he falls down head first. He throws himself backwards on the stage floor, and if there is an unlucky drum kit in the way it can blame no one but itself. Just as wild was the debut album of Existensminimum, Last night my head tried to explode and I wrote everything down, a couple of years ago. It mixed kraut with electronica, and balalaika orchestras with pop that could be racing with his old employer Moneybrother’s in such a dizzyingly strange mess that most reviewers where lost for words in their search for the essence of Existensminimum.