Lasse Marhaug - Alive: Live Recordings 1998-2006 (Smalltown Superjazz)
4/5
By: Charlie Potter
THAT IS MORE LIKE IT.
I'm instantly and incredibly impressed with this. People who think that Prurient is the be all and end all of intense noise can go home - Lasse Marhaug will have Prurient for breakfast, mate. For years Jon Olson has been going on about "total insane killer noise", and yet I've always thought that the real talent in his band Wolf Eyes lay in their subtlety and sensitivity. This, however, is totally insane killer noise.
Track 1 is pretty much the sound of its title - 'Alarmed and Distressed Duckling', of course the actual sound of an alarmed and distressed duckling would be relatively mild if a bit upsetting. This is the sound of what's going on in his mind.
Track 2 sounds like the diseased brain rot of a torn up old man licking the sand.
Track 3 sounds like the cracking of your rib cage as every famous poet that ever lived kicks you to the ground to rewire your tongue with a rusty saw.
Track 4 is being on a tube train with the accelerator held down, all the windows smashed in and there's a man in sandals pulling at your hair trying to claw his way to safety. The destination of the train? Apocalypse.
On Track 5 the washing machine fights back.
On Track 6 you just urinated in the wrong alien's face
Track 7 asks the question: going anywhere nice for the summer? Your answer is: the human rusty stab tombola world.
There are more tracks, but I think you get the gist.
Of course the easy reference is Masami Akita, aka Merzbow, but most of Merzbow's stuff these days (certainly the more widely available stuff) revolves around white noise walls of sound. This doesn't. Neurosis once commented that if you listen to Merzbow for long enough it sounds like the ocean. This isn't really the case with Lasse Marhaug. There is a constant excited agitation to this music that could only come from someone who is really, really up for it. Merzbow doesn't require anything so physical - it's all concentration. Basically the equation goes thusly:
Merzbow - Sheryl Crow = Lasse Marhaug.
I know what you're thinking, so let me explain. Merzbow is approximately all frequencies at once. If you take out Sheryl Crow, which must be in Merzbow somewhere, you have Lasse Marhaug. Hmm.
OK, that doesn't really work, because it would the have the same rhythm as Sheryl Crow.
This could be grouped into the long-time emerging genre of music often referred to as power electronics. One of the recurring characteristics of power electronics is playing laptops through guitar pedals. It makes me feel very comfortable deep down when groups of people start using things together that weren't before used together, particularly digital and analogue systems. Perhaps one day all methods of making music will coalesce into one. Perhaps not. But the important thing is to shout 'down with the puritans!' over and over - there is absolutely no sense in damning a form of music making. If there is an approach that works for you, great. Just don't ram it down people's throats.
It's an album of live performances that Lasse Marhaug has been doing around the world for 8 years, and it stands as a really nice little collection. There's certainly enough variation between the tracks to keep it going, and it has obviously been edited down from a huge list of tracks with careful consideration. To be honest with you it would have never occurred to me to go out and get a 'power electronics' album, but I've been really pleasantly surprised by this. Who would have thought something this brutal could be carried out with such charm?
On a side note, every time that I get given something on Smalltown Superjazz I am overjoyed - not only are their releases consistently exciting and various, but they're also intellectually stimulating. I can see this label playing a massive part in experimental music in the future which to me is just another reason to reflect that the future isn't going to be all bad.
Artists in this article: Lasse Marhaug
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