Personal Best #4

Lasse Marhaug has let loose #4 of his fanzine "Personal Best". This year´s subtitle being "fanzine for noise, music and mic placement"!

Interviews from 2012 and 2013 with Jim O´Rourke, Norway´s Kai Kobi Mikalsen and Årabrot, Ray Ahn (The Hard-Ons), Okkyung Lee by C. Spencer Yeh (on film mostly), Kimihide Kusafuka, Marco Fusinato and Keith Fullerton Whitman (on running a mail order for weird music).

May be ordered from Marhaug Forlag, or bought from selected shops.

Check it out.

And visit Fullerton Whitman´s Mimaroglu Music Sales!

Personal Best #3

The third issue of Lasse Marhaug´s fanzine "Personal Best" is out, this time with the subtitle "fanzine for noise, music and random chaos", and is a must read. Again some great interviews with musicians, no pussyfooting, and not always about music.

This time let me mention the talks with Norwegian bass player Guro Skumsnes Moe, and musician and Miasmah boss Erik Skodvin (he does not like his Svarte Greiner project to be classified as "dark ambient". Now he says!). I also enjoyed the interview with the Australian drummer Will Guthrie very much, and i confess here and now, that I will never attend a concert by Torturing Nurse, if they still keep touring! No way!

Marhaug: You´re a victim of fusion?
Guthrie: Yeah, a victim of fusion.
Marhaug: I´m sorry to hear.

Order "Personal Best" from Marhaug Forlag, or fine stores like Tiger (Oslo) and Robot (Bergen). And don´t worry, the fanzine is all in English of course.

Here are a few words on #1 and #2.

Personal Best #2

Lasse Marhaug has released the second issue of his "Personal Best" fanzine, this time described as "Fanzine for noise, music and no progress" (my blog post on the first issue here).
What you get is mostly quite fresh interviews (although one is from 2007), and Marhaug himself interviewed Jaakko Vanhala (on tea drinking, and you wine snobs may just give in!), Phil Blankenship (just released a spoken word album with lyrics from Red Hot Chili Peppers´ "Blood Sugar Sex Magic"), Don Dietrich from Borbetomagus, Attila Csihar and Maja S.K. Ratkje.

The Ratkje interview is about artists and the need to go political, and the Norwegian oil company Statoil and their quite huge cultural grants (1 million Norwegian kroner!).
Do artists sell their souls or not?

I also liked Thor-Erik Johnsen´s talk with Fredrik Ness Sevendal and Øyvind Holen´s with Dylan Carlson from Earth (from 2011).

Nice fanzine, and quite good pictures too!
Both #1 and #2 are sold by Tiger of Oslo.

And it´s all in English!

Personal Best #1

Musician, noise maker, record company manager, publisher and festival organizer Lasse Marhaug has made a fanzine called "Personal Best #1. Noise, music and beyond" (Marhaug Forlag 2011).
Sindre Bjerga, Bruce Russell (by Thor-Eirik Johnsen), Chulki Hong, Tommi Keränen, John Wiese, Svein Egil Hatlevik, Ryosuke Kiyasu (by Shane Bowden), Ronnie Sundin, Oren Ambarchi, Daniel Menche, Pentti Dassum, Vivian Wang and C. Spencer Yeh are all interviewed by Marhaug, except where other names are given

This fanzine (well, it´s more like a regular magazine than an old fashioned, messy fanzine) is of course a must for the ones among you hung up on the noise scenes of Korea, Singapore and Finland, but great fun for the rest of us too. I only knew 3-4 artists before reading, but enjoyed reading about the new ones (for me) just as much. The interviews all start bang on, no background info given, and several of them are not about the artists´own music (Ronnie Sundin draws). Oren Ambarchi is mainly talking about AC/DC, C. Spencer Yeh about movies and the opening question for Daniel Menche is "How many times have you broken bones in your body?".

For sale at Oslo´s Tiger.