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Jazzkammer interview for Unrestrained! Magazine 2003 by Alvin Wee
While not yet a household name in the harsh industrial and noise scenes like Whitehouse or Merzbow, Norwegian duo Jazzkammer has lurked around the fringes of these genres as one of the best kept insider secrets in experimental electronics, gaining much recognition from their solo and group collaborations with scene stalwarts like Masami Akita (Merzbow) and John Wiese (Bastard Noise, Sissy Spacek).
Unrestrained! caught up with Lasse Marhaug and John Hegre for a chat during their month-long stint in Singapore as they went about providing a live soundtrack to nightly performances of Pulse (an avant garde play about female sexuality), recording their similarly titled new album, and playing concerts. It's hard to imagine how a noise performance could fit into a theatre play without pummelling everyone senseless by the end of an hour-and-a-half, or simply drowning out all the action and degenerating into senseless cacophony.
However, John feels there are distinct advantages to working with noise as a soundtrack. "If you work with [conventional] music, you impose stuff on the play; atmosphere for example," he begins patiently. "Different music has very distinct feelings to it, as well as references, and so a type of music is always a reference point to something. As with noise, it's using sound without a clear reference point to music history or anything like that."
Which happens to be the real problem even the most seasoned metal listeners have with the entire noise genre: the inability to identify with the overwhelming barrage of white noise and feedback. But as Lasse explains, metal and noise aren't really as far apart as most people imagine. "Actually I'm an old metalhead, I grew up listening to extreme metal. When I was a teenager, I was really into Earache and all that early grindcore/death metal stuff. So that's actually my background and I base my noise music upon that stuff, that energy which I find in that music. I find it connects really easily."
Most metal fans find it hard to make that leap from the relatively structured brutality of extreme metal, to the all-out ferociousness of the harsh noise that artists like Jazzkammer produce, but the Norwegian black metal scene's recent exploration of electronic styles has brought the two genres closer together than ever before. "Ulver is metal, and we've just remixed them!" exclaims Lasse excitedly. Indeed, while bands like Lunaris, Satyricon and D_dheimsgard have fiddled around with their electronic and industrial influences, scene legends Ulver have plunged head-first into uniting the two styles with their retrospective remix-album 1st Decade In the Machines, inviting some of the biggest (and most obscure) names in noise to reinterpret their work. "There's Merzbow on there, and all these other noise people," continues Lasse, stressing the union of the two styles. A sign that the metal scene is finally opening its doors to its closest neighbours?
"Yeah, it's opening up, noise people look at metal and vice versa," Lasse nods emphatically. He adds seemingly as an afterthought, "I've played a concert with Mannheim, the first drummer from Mayhem! It was two laptops and a big metal drum-set, and it really worked. We talked about what we wanted to do, and he would be playing sort of waves [ripples hands out], like woooosssshhhhh!....and it really worked well." Not to be outdone, John decides to pipe up. "Well I'm a sound engineer, and I'm from Bergen so I do sound for all the black metal bands there. Two years ago, I was on tour with Enslaved during which I did the sound for them, but I also did some noise which we incorporated into their set...and it worked!"
Perhaps it's the sheer energy of noise, or listeners' inexplicable desire to push the limits of their tolerance, that perpetuates the genre and its ever-growing legion of followers, many of whom - like Lasse himself - hail from the metal scene. John, not quite a metal fan to begin with, explains the appeal of noise in his terms. "To me it was the extremity of it, it was fascinating. I felt that a lot of bands posing to be noise-rock or calling themselves noisy were just exploiting noise; at the end of songs they were making a lot of noise. But on Extreme Music From Japan [a classic noise compilation], it was all brutal noise, except for one little bit on the Masonna track which was musical. I thought this was totally the other way around: Masonna was exploiting music instead!"
True to form, Jazzkammer's two concerts in Singapore were hair-raising hours of mind-numbingly harsh static, twisted guitar drones and amplified feedback, washing over the listener in skin-flaying waves of sonic mayhem. Attending a noise show like Jazzkammer's is akin to experiencing the full impact of a natural disaster in aural form; the most powerful metal concert can't even approximate the terrifying force unleashed by the innocuous setup of Powerbook computers, guitars and mixers. It's easy to see how a lover of any extreme music could be instantly converted by the sheer intensity of the performance.
"I've been at Merzbow and Government Alpha concerts, where loads of people have never heard anything like noise, and a lot of people love it. It's the instant kick, I think," opines John. "Yeah, I think if people are exposed to it, they will be open to it," adds Lasse earnestly. "Most people are very open given the chance to experience it, so let's try to avoid keeping [the scene] elitist or closed."
Even so, albums by noise artists like Jazzkammer seldom manage to shift the number of copies that metal, or even power electronics and industrial albums do, and with many labels choosing to do ridiculously limited print runs of each release, drumming up publicity on a large scale is a veritable nightmare. Ever the optimist, John remarks, "The important thing to me is that we get to release our stuff, and get it distributed, so I consider myself lucky to get my stuff distributed worldwide, and I'm content with that. I like doing small releases, as an opposition to musical elitism." Asked to elaborate on his distaste for the modern record industry, he pauses for thought before continuing. "When bands sign up with a major label, they take years to produce a record, because they have to plan their release, and then take half a year to release and distribute it. It all makes it into a big thing, and a lot of the spontaneity is lost along the way, and when the record comes out, the music is old, often boring. This idea of working toward one big product, one perfect record...I think they lose it along the way," he muses. "They should be more productive, because they can do better stuff that way." Adds Lasse, "All the interesting artists have a huge amount of work done. I'm not just talking about noise, but look at John Coltrane, he was just pouring out albums."
"And look at the artists who have one or two CDs," John chips in, chuckling. "Look at Picasso, he produced a lot of paintings! So I like to look at the whole body of work, because people become too focussed on one part of the work, and on the business part of it - the music business, which everybody knows is the most rotten business on earth!" he finishes with a wry smile.
But with their aversion to the music industry, is Jazzkammer getting enough promotion to do their music justice? "Well it's still not reaching out everywhere, but it's as good as it gets. I still get a kick out if releasing some of my best stuff on cassette, on small labels, just to oppose this sort of musical elitism, to do the opposite and turn it upside down," continues John, evidently wanting to drive his point home.
"Now we're on Smalltown Supersound, which has the best distribution we could ask for, coming from Norway with this kind of music," Lasse explains finally. "But I'm also opposed to limited editions, I feel that everything should be available," he adds, as if reading my mind for the next question. Artists and labels putting out annoyingly obscure limited editions (frequently under a hundred copies) has almost become standard practice in the noise and industrial scene, resulting in dedicated collectors shelling out hundreds of dollars for absurdly elusive private pressings. "They can do that if they want to," reasons Lasse. "I'm a record collector myself, and I pay big money for some old, rare stuff. It's just objects of desire, so it's a sort of fetish. We love that as well, the idea that a record is not just music, it's a whole package. It can be a cheap xerox tape, or a book with a CD in it. You don't have to keep the little vinyl thingy available forever, but make an mp3 so it's there on offer. Nothing is better than bootlegging, or mp3s and piracy," he adds without further prompting.
"We are pro-piracy," explains John when asked if bootlegging doesn't annoy them the way it seems to bother so many other musicians. "I don't know why artists don't want people to listen to their music." He brushes aside my suggestion that money seems to be the main motive for artists clinging so tightly to their copyright. "Well then they should become a broker or something. I don't think I've seen any artists focussed on making money this way actually making it. They're just struggling to. They're just backing up the record industry and never really making a load of money."
Catching on quickly, Lasse takes the opportunity to continue John's rant. "Yeah it's funny how all the artists are friends of the record industry. It should be the other way around because now with mp3, they have a chance to fuck up the record industry and change things for the better. The record industry is the one with the problem, not the artists. But the record industry has convinced artists that they're having the problem, because people are listening to their music," he bristles.
As we move on, discussing music in general, topics about the oft-demonized power electronics scene crops up. After sharing so much musical ground with allegedly right-wing groups like Genocide Organ and Con-Dom, Lasse is more than eager to comment on the controversial racial and political stance these acts seem to take. "Knowing Mike from Con-Dom, and what his stand is, I think a lot of people don't get Con-Dom. Because Con-Dom is sort of a theatre thing, and he's taking on various roles. If he's singing something about serial killers, he's just taking the role of a serial killer. Stupid people think he likes that, when actually he's acting more like a sort of mirror." What about blatantly misogynistic groups like Control or Whitehouse then, with lyrics overtly championing female sexual abuse and male dominance? "I tend to take Whitehouse as a sort of extreme musical version of Benny Hill," he laughs. "Because he's English, he's really funny, and talks about sex and dirty stuff."
Seeing the quizzical look on my face, he explains further. "This goes all the way back to Throbbing Gristle, and as far as I know all these are highly intellectual people. They're not Nazis or punks moving on their compulsions, they're more intellectual people interested in pushing limits, and seeing how you can challenge people, how stupid people get. They want to show how people don't want to explore things, to challenge things, how they only want to see a clear flat picture and judge stuff. It's more like challenging the media and the general public, by pushing and pushing them. It's media manipulation, more like a protest as I see it. It's cultural terrorism," he finishes, evidently referring to the Grey Wolves, long known in the power electronics scene as "cultural terrorists".
Clearly on a roll, he continues, "Musically, I love all that stuff, Whitehouse, Genocide Organ, Brighter Death Now, the Grey Wolves etc.. And they're cool guys, all these guys are really sweet!" Barely pausing to regain his breath, he rambles on. "I love that sound, and now it's coming back as a sort of style, the power electronics, eighties sound. It's a really powerful sound, with the low frequencies and high pitched sounds."
Needless to say, the analogue crunch and spontaneous lyrical violence of classic power noise acts shows up most clearly in Jazzkammer's live sound. In their performance during the play, key snippets of monologue are heavily processed by the duo's overworked laptops, warped and twisted into the familiar torrid ranting of Brighter Death Now or Whitehouse and thrown up against a sizzling backdrop of white-hot electronic static. It's clear where Jazzkammer gets their influences. "We listen to everything from Whitehouse to Indonesian folk music, so we take everything in," says Lasse. "There's a bit of everything in Jazzkammer." Unlike power electronics with its obvious agendas however, Jazzkammer's music doesn't carry any ideological baggage, according to John. "If you're hearing war and death, then that's ok. If you're hearing birds and honeybees then that's ok too, because we really have no answer. These are just our sound obsessions, what we have been holding in our heads. There is no agenda to it," he states plainly.
Sonic violence aside, Jazzkammer's shows are hardly anything to look at, as Lasse agrees. "I think if people are coming to electronic music and expecting a rock show, and they will be disappointed. Maybe not with Whitehouse, but 99% of the rest are boring to look at." I beg to differ, citing a nerve-wracking concert I'd attended in New York, where Pete Helmkamp (Angelcorpse) put on an amazing show as death industrial outfit Terror Organ while Lea Helmkamp, fully decked out in bondage gear, threw a television set into the audience and began smashing it to pieces with a sledgehammer.
"I've done very physical shows too," says Lasse nonchalantly. "First ones I did had blood and vomiting and sex-change operations on video; I had a guy cutting himself, and shaving his hair and burning it, and vomiting fake blood and crawling around. So yes, I have done these things and it's great to see other people do it, but now I just like to focus on the sound." Case closed it seems; the duo obviously intend to leave showmanship and ideology to the rest of scene, concentrating solely on aesthetic exploration like their Japanoise counterparts Merzbow and Aube.
Aside from making for a boring live show, the growing use of laptops by harsh noise artists (in contrast to their earlier use of scrap metal and physical instruments) has also come under much criticism for resulting in a flat, uniform sound standard across the scene. Even a noise legend like Merzbow has come under fire from certain quarters for having given up the textural immediacy of analogue sound sources for the Powerbook. Given that the laptop is also Jazzkammer's weapon of choice, Lasse has much to say in favour of computers. "The laptop is a tool, like scrap-metal and feedback systems. When you travel around, you can bring it with you, whereas with scrap-metal, it's hard. People say it's boring to look at, but it's not much more exciting to see someone with a guitar and pedals."
John nods emphatically in agreement. "A lot of artists have converted to laptops because of the convenience. This is the modern four-track recorder, so to speak. A lot of people who didn't make music before have started making music on laptops. You get people trying out stuff on laptops because there are so many possibilities. Maybe that's not as focussed as their earlier stuff, where they had more limitations. But I think that's just a phase for most people, and they learn to welcome the laptop."
What about all the scene talk about the entire noise genre having come to a standstill in the past few years then, especially in relation to the overwhelming use of computers? "This constant struggle for progress is a pain in the ass," John shakes his head wearily. "Every kind of music always comes to this point, especially when in many parts of the world you have this boom in noise music in the last four or five years. I think the scene still very strong, and there's still interesting stuff coming out of it in different directions. Merzbow's been around for 25 years, and he's still putting out some amazing new recordings, still sounding fresh after all these years, so people complaining about things not progressing..." He trails off, only for Lasse to chip in excitedly, "They're not listening! You just have to listen, because there are a lot of good ideas that's still out there."
Pausing to think, John finally continues. "Some stuff is just becoming more focussed over the years, and goes into different sub-genres, like all other kinds of music like folk or country. You can't stop it: if you tried to stop progression, you just wouldn't be able to."
So what direction has Jazzkammer been moving in? "In the last couple of months, we've been getting louder live, but on record we've been getting quieter. But this isn't planned progression or anything," says John. The difference between the duo's studio material and live improvisation is marked, with the former focussing more on structure and detail, while the immediacy of live performance warrants a more open, wildly eclectic sound.
"It's two different projects really," explains Lasse. "Live, you have forty minutes where you're there and have an audience listening; you have control of the listening environment. You don't have that on a CD. People could be listening on a headset, a crappy stereo or good one, in the car, and they'll be skipping tracks and whatever. Also when we work, we don't live in the same cities, we work on our own and send CDs and files back and forth. So it's different listening situations and different work situations."
Whatever the case, Jazzkammer albums have always explored more musical aspects of noise, with barely discernible snippets of structure and elusive melody permeating the wall of sound. With the new album already recorded and slated to hit the shelves in June, both noise and metal fans alike should find a great deal of satisfaction in Jazzkammer's richly textured, frighteningly intense world of sonic chaos.
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