Jenny Hval Video portrait

Jenny Hval Video Portrait from The Wire Magazine on Vimeo.

This seems to be the first in a series of video portraits of artists, dircted by IJ Biermann. Jenny Hval (aka Rockettothesky) was filmed in  Oslo 7th March 2011, and the music is from her new Rune Grammofon release"Viscera" (recommended!). Some more info over at Vimeo, or at  Wire.

The very same  Biermann is also making a documentary on Maja Ratkje  (as mentioned in the blog already),  and it´s probably being finished this year.

Singing A Song In The Morning

John Wesley Harding and friends sing "Singing a song in the morning" by Kevin Ayers, at a benefit concert for Japan. Check out the theremin!

(Oops. Not a benefit concert obviously, but at least a song dedicated to the victims of the tsunami).

Stian Westerhus at Jazz Maastricht

According to a comment on YouTube Stian Westerhus scared off some of the audience at Jazz Maastricht. What do we care?  Here you all have 14 minutes of  Westerhus improv ! This happened 25 March 2011.

Oh, hello, I´m back again the day after the original posting, to share with you a description made by the reviewer in  Telegraph, who obviously must have been quite shell-shocked by Westerhus at the Gateshead Jazz Festival: "Guitarist Stian Westerhus is a maker of that portentously mystical, Northern-lights-glimmering-over-the-tundra “jazz”, which must be Norway’s biggest export after natural gas (and not so different from it, some might say)". 

Wyatt´s otherworldly voice

Mira Arayo from Ladytron chooses Robert Wyatt´s "Shipbuilding" as one of her favorites, saying this: "Robert Wyatt is one of my favourite musicians. His voice is totally otherworldly and I can never tire of it, his haunting fragile production and interesting chord changes".

Since Mira is such a well spoken lady, Ladytron will have a video in this blog!
OK, I´m for sale!

Marhaug: All Music At Once

Lasse Marhaug is at it again with "All music at once" (Smalltown Superjazzz 2011). This time using only the "Marhaug" name, and working with some of Norway´s finest noise makers (a new band perhaps?)
The gang: Jon Wesseltoft, Stian Westerhus, Hild Sofie Tafjord, Lasse Marhaug, Kevin Drumm and Maja S.K. Ratkje.

Marhaug has made a varied album. We get brutal metal ("Born cold"), electric storms hiding wild beasts ("Blood of the beast", "Don´t buy bread, buy dynamite", "All music at once") and deep, dark ambient noise ("Feed the earth and master it" and "Mountain of the seven vultures").

I know you seldom find me doing some deep analysis in this blog (OK, never then!), and I see no reason to try here. Just turn up the volume!
This works best when you really feel the noise.

Borealis Avgarde Extreme

Borealis 2011 is over. The hardest working musicians the last day of the festival must have been Le Jury: Ricardo Odriozola (violin), Jostein Stalheim (accordion) and Einar Røttingen (piano), who improvised for twelve hours during the Borealis Avgarde Extreme happening (Avgarde being the organization of new music in Bergen). The guys had short breaks to order food  and have necessary timeouts, but most of the time all three were playing.
The musicians had electrodes attached to their scalps, and we were able to see the EEG, a graphical representation of electrical activity in the brain. The signals were also used by electronic media artist Trond Lossius, creating a live visual display.

I visited five or six times during the performance, and was impressed by the energy! The video in this post was filmed when they had been playing for eleven hours, and the violin player had recently been dancing so hard that he pulled out all the wires!
Towards the end they had burnt most of the fuel, and I guess it was just as good that the brain activity was not monitored then.

Take a look at another video filmed after one hour of playing, and this one filmed after five hours of playing, and my pictures from Borealis Avgarde Extreme, and other Borealis concerts, on Flickr.

I Should Have Known

Soft Machine - I Should I've Known (1967) by Tushratta

I posted a YouTube video of this once, but this Soft Machine video of "I should have known" from 1967,  with Kevin Ayers, Mike Ratledge and Robert Wyatt is so cool, that we are having it once more!