| Jazzkammer interview from THE WIRE 2002 by Philip Sherburne Free Willy! Last train to silly. Super belly flop, kung-fu sister. Bullets for breakfast. Pancakes: ghosts made of paper. Your disc is ready. No, these aren't the mutterings of a Turretic attendant at the CD plant, nor are they verses from the latest Clark Coolidge chapbook. They're track titles from the discography of Norway's Jazzkammer, the duo of Lasse Marhaug and John Hegre. They also might be considered keys, secret passwords to unlock the inner chambers of their music. Because if at first Jazzkammer's output sounds like track after track of scraped and battered drone and static, further and deeper listens reveal otherworldly shapes and colors, apt sonic complements for titles as imagistic as "Oolong" and "Elevator Necklace." In Jazzkammer's gravelly materialism, tonal elements peel away like layers of onionskin and sparking tones fizzle like slow fuses: every sound seems connected to a thing that it is not. Like the finest of architects, Jazzkammer sound like obsessives, but they sim their cities from 30,000 feet up: their approach to detail makes every ornament a speck, every blip mere grist for the mill, and the resulting blur is a brilliant field of white noise tinted the faintest shade of pink. There is something brutal and tender about it all at once. Jazzkammer was born in 1998 after Marhaug and Hegre collaborated with Helge Sten of Supersilent and Deathprod. "We were both looking for a steady constellation to work with," says Marhaug, "and when we did the collaboration we found out we had the same obsessions in sound." In 1999, Rune Grammofon released Timex, a muted affair favoring fields of static and shadowy harmonics, and the next year California's Ground Fault label put out Hot Action Sexy Karaoke -- a baffling pileup of fast-forwarded hillbilly picking, apocalyptic vacuuming, porn samples, drones, and deconstructed Derek Bailey. By 2001, an alchemical cast of remixers had turned Timex to Rolex for Norway's Smalltown Supersound, who also released their collaboration with Merzbow at the 2001 Molde International Jazz Festival. That album sounds like anything but "jazz" (nor does it sound much like classic Merzbow): a sprawling crescendo of looped beats, free drumming, and collapsing overtones, it's half composed, half improvised. "Our studio recordings are never improvised," says Marhaug, although their live performances are built upon more spontaneous processes. Smalltown Supersound's Joakim Haugland describes their live sets as "jazz improv done with 'modern' electronics. They have their heritage from Ornette Coleman as well as Autechre and Merzbow, with the energy from black-metal/grind core." As to instrumentation, says Marhaug, "We use whatever is needed and available, be it software, hardware or instruments. We're not PowerBook purist snobs; we use anything from guitars and turntables to old analogue syntheziers and cheap dictaphones. We occationally steal sounds, although it's so heavily processed it doesn't resemble its source, so we can hardly be called sons of John Oswald, or be sued by U2." Despite a mutual lack of formal musical training, both musicians come from different backgrounds. The self-described "noise musician" Marhaug, 27, played with the psych/drone band Del and racked up credits on over 100 cassette and vinyl releases. "In my early teens I listened to extreme metal bands like Napalm Death and Carcass," recalls Marhaug. "I grew up in the countryside in the northern part of Norway above the arctic circle and there wasn't anybody to start a band with, so I started experimenting with tape recorders on my own, scratching records and making cut-ups." The more urban-oriented Hegre, a guitarist who had turned toward electronics, played in the free improv group Der Brief. More recently he has worked with the electronic pop group Kaptein Kaliber on Bergen's Tellé records. (This puts Jazzkammer at only two degrees of separation from the sunny-day Röyksopp, which seems a mildly disturbing coincidence.) The two still live in different cities: Marhaug is in Trondheim, and Hegre in Bergen. Their collaboration is almost entirely virtual. "We send soundfiles to each other and spend hours on the phone discussing what we want to do. We'll keep sending it back and forth until it works," explains Marhaug. Whatever crosses the wires, though, must be an exceptionally private discourse, because Marhaug, generally at the ready with a witty rejoinder, declines to elaborate on how such subtle, abstract sonics can be hashed out on the phone. "I'll take your comment as a compliment," he demurs. (Oddly, Norway's Alog also works via this long-distance collaboration, making one wonder if it's a kind of Scandinavian phenomenon.) Pancakes offers an even more subtle fusion of grit, whine, and tone, where tapped strings and patch chords hiccup quietly, like a memory of instruments resurfacing from the subconscious. Marhaug is loathe to pinpoint any particular influences, although he cites the visual arts and "bad music" for himself, video games and soft drinks for Hegre. "We look at Pancakes as our rebellious punk rock album. But it's a quiet rebellion." But Pancakes suggests Jazzkammer's continued interest in the crossover between linguistic and musical imagery. "There's an obvious link between the enjoyment of food and the enjoyment of music, and this album seemed fit to compare to a stack of good pancakes. With or without maple syrup," deadpans Marhaug, but the album itself sounds flattened, compressed, doughy and pocketed with air holes. (Indeed, nine and a half minutes of the 10-minute long opening track, "No Place Like Home," are almost silent -- though there's a wealth of liquid activity with the volume turned up.) Chalk it up to the power of suggestion, but on Pancakes Jazzkammer seem to have discovered the synaesthetic overlap between carbohydrates and grainy electroacoustics. It's as good a metaphor as any for a music that exhausts terms like drone, noise, and even jazz. Which brings up the question of Jazzkammer's curious name -- a question Marhaug summarily dismisses. "The name Jazzkammer doesn't mean anything. It just sounded good and we couldn't think of anything else. Jazz music seems to be pretty popular in Norway at the moment, but of course these days anything can be jazz. Even we." |
