Lasse Marhaug & John Wiese US west coast tour

This tuesday Norwegian noise master Lasse Marhaug meets up with John Wiese in LA to start a short west coast tour. A new duo album "Country & Western" will be available at the gigs. The announced dates are as follows:

02.02
KXLU 88.9FM at Midnight
Los Angeles, CA

02.06
w/ Gerritt Wittmer
The Lab (23Five Presents)
San Francisco, CA

02.07
w/ Ryan Jencks, Michael Gendreau
Terminal
Oakland, CA

02.10
w/ Dried Up Corpse, Physical Demon
The Black Lodge
Seattle, WA

02.11
w/ Sex Negatives, The Rita
Hotel Gallery
Vancouver, CANADA

02.12
w/ Zbigniew Karkowski, Daniel Menche
Reed College
Portland, OR

02.14
w/ Seven Depressions, Joe & Joe
The Smell
Los Angeles, CA

Metal Merchants Festival this weekend

Metal Merchants Festival kicks off on this friday the 29th @ John Dee, Oslo. They promise a weekend filled with metal, screams and pounding drums. Starting off in 2009, they wanted to bring back heavy metal heroes from the past, heavy metal hopes for the future, and heavy metal maniacs of all ages. Line up:

OMEN (US)
TANK (UK)
SLOUGH FEG (US)
THE LAMP OF THOTH (UK)
NECRONOMICON (GER)
DARK QUARTERER (ITA)
ANIHILATED (UK)
TORCH (SWE)
SOLITAIRE (FI)
LAMENTED SOULS (NOR)

More details on the festival website.

Metronomicon Audio release party

For those around or near Oslo, make sure to find your way round to Metronomicon Audio releaseparty on this Thursday the 28th of January @ John Dee: METRONOMICON AUDIO 4.0: Center of the Universe - Magnus Moriarty™ Pilemil – Hanny – Ergo - CyranoArmageddon Koppen - Siv Sperati, Science & Spheres.
From the Metronomicon Audio website:
Metronomicon Audio is a little CD-R and CD label based in Oslo (Norway) that has chosen to go straight against the massive commercialism, double standards, vanity and unserious behaviour of the music industry.

Metronomicon Audio has focused on the fredom to make the music we like, and our never-resting design and typography crew Yokoland has done the very same in visual terms.

Metronomicon Audio is a community, with a flat structure where the artists have full control of their own music and artwork. We arrange concerts and happenings nearly all the the time, and every year we arrange the event By;Alarm, which is a mockery of all the grammy’s and awards that are to be won in the dirty, terrible, ridiculous and malicious business of music.

Lasse Marhaug celebrates Utech Records

From the Utech website:

"To mark Utech Records' five-year anniversary Lasse Marhaug recorded a piece of music titled Beauty Without Mercy. The mad, mad, mad Justin Bartlett illustrated a portrait of Marhaug and his internal twin for the cover. Endless thanks to both. To be listened to on proper speakers due to the prominent low frequencies.

Beauty Without Mercy is exclusive here and free with any order of UTECH releases."

Sound Art by Linn Halvorsrød

If you are in Trondheim you can for another week experience the sound art exhibition Soundtrack Zero 1 2 3 4ever, by Linn Halvorsrød in the Black Box at the Trøndelag Center for Contempory Art. It started on the 15th of January and is due to finish in the 31st. The sounds consists of 20 different loops of various lengths and with different lengths of silence between the repeat, so it all adds up to a composition in eternal change. The image shows the setup.

Jazkamer - Solitary Nail CD (review)

Label: Pica Disk
Catalog#: PICA014
Format: CD, Album
Country: Norway
Released: Jan 2010

This release is the first in the Jazkamer 2010 Monthly Series. A card following the CD states: “One new Jazkamer album on Pica Disk every month of 2010. One year of music and anti-music.”

Perfomed by the two founders and regular members Lasse Marhaug and John Hegre, plus Jean-Philippe Gross, who also edited and mixed this CD very interestingly.

Solitary Nail is one 30 minute track, although it feels like many tracks. It is a cut and paste of multifrequent parts combined with more one-dimensional sounds. Recordings range from guitar feedback explorations and movement of gadgets wired up with contact-microphone and very low (also volume) bass frequencies to massive full on distortion and harsh noise. At around 13:30 though, the track turns around to explore a more simple tone or feedback of very high pitch. This high pitch varies a lot, but still up there and goes on for the next ten minutes. For me this was the Solitary Nail as it went hard right inside my skull and stayed there for the full ten minutes this part of the track lasted. Be careful using earphones! After this the track moves back to exploring a more easy listening harsh wider-ranging freguencies and definetly multilayered sound.

When the monthly series was announced in November last year, Jazkamer promised to “…keep it exciting all the way, so in keeping with Jazkamer’s eclectic tradition of making very different sounding records, each monthly album will cover the wide (non)musical range Jazkamer has become known for…” With this release they have set the pace, so to speak, as it proves to be, within only 30 minutes, very diverse. It is both multilayered and one-dimensional, not to mention challenging at times.

So, for me Soiltary Nail was both nice and very disturbing at times. An experience. And I had to listen again. To experience it. Again.