Jazzkammer: Pancakes
CD - Smalltown Supersound, Norway - 2002

Reviews:

Jazzkammer: Pancakes CD
John Hegre and Lasse Marhaug of Norwegian avant-electronica duo Jazzkammer grow increasingly abstract and challenging on the eight pieces here, variously
recorded in Scandinavia, Tokyo and Edinburgh. Pancakes opens with a glitch
avalance, and then buries its events within a dull, distant rumble. High volume
levels become a necessity to track the remotes turbulances, purportedly
happening on the borders of audibility. Played loud, raw impact takes precedence
and instrumentation becomes irrelevant. Glacial electronics winds howl and roar;
static clicks amplify into explosions. Music takes form out of waves of
juddering purr, shrill tones, pulsating white noise and haphasard crackle.
Ostensibly impersonal, Jazzkammer music has established an identity, which gets
more pronounced here. Each piece is less like a recognisable musical structure
than a chamber in which sonc clouds coalesce and siperese, while soundwaves
undulate and vaporise. Hegre and Marhaug ahve harnessed their considerable
experience to the end of eluding the standard web of musical allusiveness en
route for degree zero. Naming the album Pancakes and photographing actual
pancakes for the cover is a way of mixing the message nicely, in the same way
that this apparently earnest and abstact duo followed their Timex debut on Rune
Grammofon with Hot Action Sexy Karaoke.
(Julian Cowley, The Wire)

Jazzkammer : Pancakes CD
The Norwegian formation Jazzkammer, consisting of Lasse Marhaug and John
Hegre released a sort of glitch-lowercase-noise music since 1998, as the
label calls it. They worked with Reynols, Thurston Moore, Francisco Lopez
and collaborated with Japanese noisegod Merzbow, which resulted in a
combination of everything from location recordings and sine waves to
turntablism and guitaric freakouts: rather noisy music. But things have
changed on Jazzkammer's new album. This is something completely different
than their new 3" CD, "Sound Of Music". This time they search and explore
the dynamics and silence in their sound. Long, ambient passages looking
for a place to hum, still looking and floating on until it stops. Minimal
maximum. It's still clicks, drones and digital mayhem, but on a more
gentle level. Layers of soft noise slowly mutates and unfolds into
different abstract soundscapes, creating a feeling of cinema. This new,
incredibly quiet album from Jazzkammer is subtle, sensitive, but at the
same time intelligent. Relax and enjoy it!
(Paul Bijlsma, Phosphor Magazine)