The Jade Motel

Biography

Zeigeist was a Swedish pop band and art constellation, formed 2006 and split up 2009. The musical part of Zeigeist was made by Pearl, who nowadays runs his solo project “Pearl Fiction”. They started as a collective of several artists, musicians and designers and created the art’ntainment concept. They released their debut album “The Jade Motel ” 2008 but were by then only three members: Pearl, Princess and Mattias. Zeigeist was characterized as an electro pop band with remarkable performances an...

Zeigeist was a Swedish pop band and art constellation, formed 2006 and split up 2009. The musical part of Zeigeist was made by Pearl, who nowadays runs his solo project “Pearl Fiction”. They started as a collective of several artists, musicians and designers and created the art’ntainment concept. They released their debut album “The Jade Motel ” 2008 but were by then only three members: Pearl, Princess and Mattias. Zeigeist was characterized as an electro pop band with remarkable performances and shows, with a clash of music and art performance.

They made special clothes, often big haute-couture-like dresses and used effects like fake blood, make-up, confetti, and various stage designs. Among their special shows was the one at the Swedish Arvikafestivalen 2007, where they made a dystopian performance in three acts with short novel films, produced only for this show, in between the acts. They made extraordinary photo shoots, like the studio photo with Princess surrounded in feathers and Pearl with paint dripping on his chest, all set up for one second moment with the premise of not using Photoshop.

They had several hits, the best known “Tar Heart ” has been named as one of the smartest marketing ideas during the Myspace era, when it was tagged on an early leak of the knife's “Silent Shout” (2006) under the name “F as in knife”, and became a big mystery until it was explained that it actually was a Zeigeist song named “Tar Heart”. Pitchfork Media listed the leaked demo of “Tar Heart” as one of the best songs 2006 on their yearly “Top 100 tracks of..."

In the same time as they declared their all-of-a-sudden split up, they released their last single, a cover of Roxette’s first single “Neverending Love”, with their own "Chasing your shadow all around the world" as a B-side. The split up was explained, as so many other fictive and dramatic things by Zeigeist, with a “termination” on their website that they had their personal reasons to “kill her".
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