NOR NOISE

“NOR NOISE – 12 PORTRAITS ABOUT NOISE MUSIC”
A Film By Tom Hovinbøle
[OHM] Records & Pastiche Films 2004

This double pack DVD & CD was one big inspiration for me when I first saw it. A dvd documentary about noise music is not something you can find in your common record shop or at your local dvd pusher. For me it represented a glimpse into a world quite unknown to me. Once I saw it I knew that noise was something accounted for and somehow my experiments did enter a path leading to live perfromances. I have always listened to strange music and normal music, but once this film was put in my dvd player I realised that I had missed out on something for years and years. Not strange, though, as the noise scene had somehow stayed underground for many years and only in resent years has arised and made its way to more common knowledge.

from the [Ohm] Records website:

"NOR NOISE is a documentary about Noise music – perhaps the most exiting and innovative form of music to evolve in the last years. The film maker Tom Hovinbøle has since the project started in 2001, interviewed some of the most central artists, both internationally and in Norway. The artists speaks about their relationship to tis music: What is it? Where does it come from? How do you work with pure sounds? Which possibilities opens up with the new sound processing opportunities? Noise is also put into an historical context spanning from the Futurists and Luigi Russolo before the First World War, through the first experiments with electronical music in the fifties, the avant-garde in the sixties, the Industry and Punk movements in the seventies, before Noise establishes it self as a music in its own right in Japan during the seventies. The film also contains a lot of rare concert footage with the artists. "

Some of the artists participating: Tore H. Bøe (Origami Republika), David Cotner (USA), Masami Akita (Merzbow), Lasse Marhaug, Maja S.K. Ratkje (Spunk and Fe-mail), Francisco Lopéz (Spain), Helge Sten (Deathprod) and Otomo Yoshihide (Japan) , and on the CD you can hear exciting Norwegian acts such as Jazzkammer, Crazy River, Norwegian Noise Orchestra, Fe-Mail, and more.

It is still available from the website, and being released in 2004, it is still highly valid today. In my opinion it provides an interesting introduction to Norwegian (and some international) noise history and it is a wonderfully done documentary with english subtitles.