My

This release is a shortened down version of the original song.

I remember that I wrote the string arrangement standing, in our rehearsal space.

The studio equipment was way too big to travel around with, to our small apartment on a daily basis, but we did it anyway. Since we recorded a lot at rehearsals, the computer was placed on a huge bass amp, so it was reachable.

Many arrangements was written on the bass amp. Among released songs, I remember “Search Forever!” and parts of “Night” was written like this.

The string arrangement, guitars and piano on this release, is the original recordings from those days (when I was about 22 years old). Nothing has been changed or altered. The same can be said about the studio equipment, it’s still too big to drag around, but I tend to do it anyway.

View fullsize

Moving studio equipment, around the time “My” was composed.

Ternion

I composed Ternion when I was 16-17 years old.

The arrangement was written down on yellow post-it notes and in small notebooks (as usual), before it was compiled on a better format at a later stage (the classic a4 print paper)

Parts of the arrangement was then recorded on a 4-track tape recorder. The only way you could hear the whole song, was to go to a recording studio and record it. And it so happens that we did. One of my goals at the time, was to record in a real studio at least yearly. And in those cases everything had to be arranged, rehearsed and ready. Even the effects and most of the production.

So the first recording of this song was done at Lydkjellern studio in Ålesund. Engineered and mixed by the brilliant Erik Valderhaug. I remember the long nights, with no food (I was way too enthusiastic to think about eating, still is) and then we went straight to school the morning after, with little sleep. I even remember spending my whole birthday in the studio (still with no food). This would prove to become the standard for me on my birthdays, all the way up to now. I really don’t remember any birthday, not spent in the studio or at rehearsals. That says a lot about me probably, but my weak excuse is that my birthday is at the beginning of January. There’s not that many things you can do (in Norway) at that time of year (mostly raining), plus since it’s right after the holidays, I’m super restless and the last thing I want is more cake and celebration.

When working on this release (and some others) I actually purchased a “professional” (well, as professional as they ever got) 8-track Tascam: racked tape machine, so I could transfer and analyse all the old tape recordings, before starting the production. It was all redone from scratch and it was a fun journey.

On the session with me:

Geir Arne Ose: Drums

The Crusade Effect

The Crusade Effect came from my classical background.

The main instrumental themes was arranged and orchestrated like a string quartet, but distorted and played on a guitar.

The guitar riff consists of 4 polyfonic lines, that sounds quite different when played separately, and only forms the main theme when played together .

The song has been performed live with bands, Ninth and Desert Son.

It was composed at a time when I was fascinated with taking classical themes and punk them up, and distort them.

Visual art by Torje Sæbø

Go

I composed 6 different choruses for Go, in my mid-teens.

The song has been performed a lot through the years and in different versions.

It was first highlighted in a medleyish kind of live piece that was performed extensively with my band Woo in the 90s.

Later, in the 2000s, I rearranged it into an electronic-agressive-disco-rock thing which became a standard on live shows with my next band Ninth.

The intro-rythm was made for marching drums (that was supposed to be heavily filtered and distorted over the course of the song), but after recording several snares, I changed my mind and recorded it with a digitally distorted guitar instead.

So many recordings have been done of this song. The most known one is from the Ninth: Evolver EP which was released in limited numbers in 2004, and sung by Stein Hevrøy.

When releasing this version however, I wanted to show something else. Not only has it a different chorus, but also real acoustic drums and percussion, (which has been distorted and mangled electronically after the fact), earlier versions had only programmed beats.

A big part of the programmed material in this project have been replaced with the real deal. Something I’ve generally trended towards over the past decade. After 25+ years of programming drum-machines and samplers, I eventually got tired of the predictability of it. I find the nuances and unlimited sound possibilities of capturing raw sound (but still mangling it digitally after the fact), much more creative and rewarding

It’s a bit like the difference between making your own pizza or buying a frozen one.

This is also (obviously) true with melodic instruments, especially classical instruments (like cellos and violins) It’s been a gamechanger to be able to record these live. Songs that’s impossible to figure out it, can become easy to manage, with the real world nuances of a real instrument. Since you can distort, reprogram and mangle the sound as much as you want anyway, it’s a win win!

Actually, I find it a bit interesting to see, which productions from this decade will hold up in say 20 years, with so much premanufactured sounds out there. I have a feeling that many of them will be quite embarrassing at some point in time.

Theres still a big place for the insisting nature of samples though, it’s just that it’s been overdone so often.

Visual art by Boaz Aharonovitch

Butterfly For A Night

After several dense recordings of Butterfly For A Night, I wanted to make a stripped down version of it.

I worked on this song together with songs like Behind Bars, Escaping Ixtlan and Part Of Your Compilation.

In this project, I’ve obviously had many small goals, or mini projects designed to make me able to complete this five-year-long music project.

The above mentioned songs had the work title “project impossible” together with 10 other songs (like A Million Ways, Des Guise In The Skies, Exciter and Keep Your Arms Open).

Not that these songs were more impossible to produce, than the others. The working title refers more to a time in the project, where it was crucial that I had a high success rate with the songs that I produced (in order to not run out of time and songs) with the deadline of 14 days breathing down my neck.

The problem was that I would not release anything that I didn’t feel was great and had its own uniqueness and purpose, both on its own and in the project.

If I felt at any point that a song would not be good enough I would need to rearrange or recompose it, or drop it, which ultimately would lead me to cancel the project, if necessary.

In a group of songs like this, some songs had been worked on for over 10+ years, while others were recomposed in a week. And arrangements varied from extremely complex to super-mininalistic.

But this made it refreshing and inspiring to work with the music, as the songs varied so widely from day to day, and sometimes from hour to hour.

Which of course, was the point with this project.

Since I have composed music as long as I remember, I easily get bored if I have to do the same thing over and over again. It’s particularly boring to do what everybody else does.

So productions that reminds me of what other people are doing (and many would call mainstream) are naturally scrapped. Or in other words, considered a cliché.

For many rockers “Butterfly” is probably considered a cliché by itself (like most ballads). For me, it would be a cliché to orchestrate it too much, as it probably came from my lifelong love for classical music.

I wanted it to be broken, more realistic and therefore not too dense. So it was recorded live with an acoustic guitar, upright bass and a voice.

It was a simple demo that trumped bigger productions of the same song.

If the song had belonged to another group of songs in the project, it is possible that the outcome had been different, but I like to think that it would not.

Visual art: Nicholas Archer

The Ordeal

The production and recording of “The Ordeal” was done when I was quite young (in 1997), as I transitioned from cassette-studio to digital recording equipment (which was quite revolutionary at the time). The recording was then transferred to newer digital equipment a couple of times, as I expanded my recording gear.

When I started to work on the released version, I decided to merge it with a live recording of the song (where I had the individual instruments on a multitrack) to get the energy and tempo changes from the live show.

This is a time consuming job, which has become the standard for many songs in this project.

The song was performed extensively with my bands “Woo” and “Ninth”, especially when we were performing several sets of music.

I remember vividly when we played an all nighter in Little Rock, and after taking down the equipment at 6 am, we jumped right into the hotel swimming pool without taking off our clothes, as it was super hot.

This didn’t land well with the hotel crew as they had to empty the pool after our stunt.

It was fun to play this song live, and the crowd used to go crazy.

Even our managers and business people highlighted this song as one of the potential radio hits (pretty big business guys too!). But there’s always a catch, & obviously they wanted me to shorten it.

It went like: “Wow this is great!, just shorten it to 3 minutes and we’re really talking!! We’ll get heavy rotation on this!”

And maybe I should,

but I never did.

When These Days Are Over

I composed “When These Days” when I was 15-16 years old. At the time I was playing in an acoustic folk band, but started to compose with an electric ensemble in mind.

I wanted to have all the possibilities that electric instruments and electronic equipment could give me.

The lyrics (and vocal melody) for the song is composed by Stig Lunblad-Sandbakk.

There are several recordings of the song, both live and studio recordings.

This particular version is based on a live concert recording with my band Woo, from 2001.

Photo: Boaz Aharonovitch