Lasse Marhaug

Context
When: 04.06.2021
Where: Over the ether
What: Noise, silence, life and more

C: What is the definition of noise music according to you?

L: Noise music is a border line genre which encompasses a lot. Generally speaking, I would say that noise music is sounds put in a musical context and experienced in a musical context. The reason we call it noise music is that the more conventional building blocks of music such as harmonies, melodies and rhythms are set aside. They can definitely be present, but they’re not as relevant. Noise music is thus a purely auditory experience.

Many types of noise music utilizes electric devices. Electricity as we know it is a way of taming nature, so electric generated noise music is just a filtration of energy; a very natural, pure thing. The music exists prior to hitting our ears as an electric signal, and enters the physical realm in contact with a speaker surface which amplifies the electric fluctuations. When we listen to a recording of an instrument, we hear the sound of how that music sounded in the room it was recorded. But with noise music, the sound doesn’t exist as a pre-recorded something. Every time a noise piece is executed then, is a unique manifestation of the aforementioned signal in that very room which it is being played.

C: Despite having participated on numerous recordings, you are not comfortable with calling yourself a musician. How come?

L: I consider myself a visual artist; a photographer and an illustrator. I’ve never been comfortable in the role as a musician. I’ve somehow managed to sneak into the musical realm. When I listen to music, I don’t hear harmonies or notes; I just hear frequencies.

C: Do you think noise music, and let’s just call it noise from here on out, is easier to access via visual parameters than auditory parameters?

L: My experience of noise is very visual. It’s almost like a hallucination to me. My response to noise, and almost all types of music I listen to, is that they conjure images for my inner eye to behold.

C: In other words, the opposite of me.

L: I can add that I’m a person who’ve never touched a drop or alcohol, smoked a cigarette or intoxicated myself with any other substance in my entire life. Still, when I hear people describe their experience with drugs, I can relate somehow. The difference is that instead of running a substance through my body, I’ve got sound running through my ear channels. That sound is an incentive to work with hallucinations, or perhaps better; associations. It can be quite extreme sometimes.

C: Maybe music is too abstract, and that we need pictures to make it more concrete? I view most religions in the same way: They personify certain aspects of the human experience which is too hard to describe without having it embedded in some sort of saint or god; tangible objects which exists — as visual replications of a certain aspect — in time and space.

L: I think that is true. We have an urgent need to organize our heads, something which I think religion can help out with. Noise does that job well for me. It cleanses my head in a way. And it doesn’t have to be loud to do so. It’s not like a cathartic experience in that sense.

Just like religion, we seek towards music in order to experience things we can’t put into words. It has this magical trait of being immaterial. Efforts of describing music are very often poor, and genres and classifications are pragmatic approaches at best. There have been written thick books about music from all sorts of viewpoints. That’s OK. But you can also just call it something, attend the concert, get the experience, and be happy with that.

C: What about those who are new to noise? Is it necessary to go through a de-learning process in order to listen to and appreciate it?

L: You hear what you’re used to hearing. If you come fra a classical background, you’ll hear something from that background in it. I released a record called All Music At Once. It kind of sounds linke a punk joke, but there’s something to it. Noise is all music at the same time [some noise music contains all the audible frequencies at the same time, thus all possible sounds and combinations of sounds are embedded into it , ed,], and you choose what you want to extract out from it. Noise usually has so much information — too much information — so we need to make a choice in how to relate to it, otherwise it becomes overwhelming. If you make a sound playing saxophone, the start point is nothingness, and the player needs to add to that nothingness. With noise it’s the opposite. It’s about limiting the total-ness. Just like with a photography, it is the segment you show which is important: That which is left out, is what defines the picture.

Noise comes without one correct answer. It’s a fantastic mystery which I can choose how to relate to, and I do think that most people who come to noise feels the same way. I can also understand that many can’t relate to it, and that they want a sculpted, pre-fabricated story, but I’m not interested in that.

I find a lot of the same things in certain other types music, like free jazz. I know it has other building blocks, but I still get the same effect. It doesn’t have to be loud, it’s about the density of information which in turn gives you the opportunity to jump between different ways of listening to the music and to make internal connections with what you are listening to. It’s a practice, but after a while it’s possible to make those connections really fast.

C: Not so different from life, which is chaos, after all.

L: We wish for things to be calm and stable, but reality is never like that. The degree to which you are content is more about how you relate to that chaos, your ability to dance through it and to filtrate out what’s unnecessary for your wellbeing. 

C: I get the feeling that society makes us filter out the same things, and that we are living in a day and age where we are prone to view things in exactly the same way — something which perhaps are reflected in what kind of music people listen to. My experience is that the type of music that we and our peers are probing and bringing to life is totally inaccessible for most people.

L: Yes, and I think it’s strange. In other art forms, the parallells to what we are doing musically is accepted. Few people nowadays bats an eye over an abstract painting. Ambiguity is valued in photography. Digging deep into the uncharted parts of the human mind is what you expect to find in literature. But as soon as it comes to music, it should serve some type of function. It’s utterly tragic, especially when we look back at all the groundbreaking activity which has taken place the last 60 years. 

I think one reason for this is that the music we do, does not match very well with an economical model based on profit and eternal growth. Another reason for it is that we view music as entertainment more than an art. It’s always supposed to sell you something, a mood or a feeling. If we could just view it as art, the problem solves itself.

The function of art is that it gives us a chance to practice being a human being. Art is an empathy machine which we can enter and play with for a while. A novel allows us to become the psychotic serial killer, but also allows us to go out of it, hopefully with a feeling of knowing what being a psychotic serial killer might be like. It’s an extract of reality within a safe and established framework. I expect a same type of experience from a musical piece or performance: to jump into it and let it shake me to bits, and hopefully come out as a slightly better person on the other side.

C: Are you saying that you think music should be dirty?

L: Art is a place where we’re allowed to be dirty. That being said, I experience art — especially noise — as something pure. Noise erases the room you’re in and turns it into something different. I don’t view noise as a temporal thing, with a beginning and an end. I listen inwards, and I’m not that concerned with what has been or with what is going to be. Form comes naturally by itself, and by listening inwards instead of sideways, I get an elastic experience of time. It’s not an ecstatic feeling, but just the feeling of entering into a different realm. And when it’s done, it’s done. Simple as that!

C: The vertical experience of time, if I understand you correctly, is something I can relate to. Whereas horizontal time is a constant reminder and indicator of our limited time, the vertical time on the other hand, is eternal and unshakeable. But if we want to experience that realm, we also need to let go of our horizontal self. Who then, is listening to or playing the music?

L: The best noise is the one where you can’t really hear or notice the presence of composer or player. Then the music plays itself, and there’s nothing standing in the way between me and the experience. The French composer Luc Ferrari stated that he was constantly trying to remove his compositional takes on his music. He said that if the listener was conscious of what he was doing, then he was doing a poor job. It was only when the piece manifested as a purely aesthetically experience with his writing being “invisible”, that the composition was good. I can relate fully to that, also in my own work. I think that our personality finds its way into the music regardless of us being conscious of it or not, so there’s no need focusing on that. We all have our bag of tricks, but the technique should never define the aesthetics.

C: I think it is puzzling that we desperately try to make our world, which through our filter is dirty and chaotic, into this pure and tidy place. I think that is why most people are so adverse towards dissonances in music. But that’s just me talking. What about silence? What is silence in contrast to noise?

L: Noise is a kind of silence. I’ve always been sensitive to sound, and I use my noise to clean away all the other unwanted noise which constantly surrounds us. I can achieve other people’s desire for silence by making a tapestry of my own noise.

I can of course appreciate what we could call classical silence; sitting in the nature, relaxing on the beach. But technically it’s not silence. We’re surrounded by sounds all the time, and if it gets really quiet around us, we start to hear the sounds which are happening inside of us: blood rushing, heart throbbing. John Cage said “life is silence”. In other words absolute silence occurs when we die. Life is noise, death is silence.

A journalist once put me up against the leader of a Norwegian organization against noise. The journalist thought we would disagree on almost everything, but we more or less agreed on everything. It ended with the leader asking me to write an introduction to their yearly report. Noise and silence are not contradictions. The language we use is limited. “Noise” is usually a term used for sounds which do damage or makes us feel uneasy. Heavy Metal isn’t the sound of heavy metal, however, and rock’n roll is not the sound of a rocks tumbling down a hill. Free music isn’t always that free either. “Absolute sound” or “absolute music” is perhaps a better term for noise music.  

C: Absolute music would make for an interesting idiom. What, then, is absolute silence?

L: We are fragile beings. We can’t stand silence very well. Silence is used as a torture method, and some of the worst punishments you can get is to be put in isolation; to be robbed of the ability to sense. It’s used to make people lose themselves. 

If we’re exposed to 160 db we become deaf. When we get too close to the absolute, we are meddling with something which is potentially harmful. Moderation is key.

C: Let’s just rewind a little bit. We talked about different types of musics and their social function. Has noise been around too long in the sense that it too has expectations tied to it, and that it serves a certain function in certain milieus?

L: No, we’re not there yet, and if we ever get there we would be in serious trouble. Then it would be better to do something completely different.

Everything doesn’t have to be new or groundbreaking. There are some conservative attitudes in alle genres of music which makes the person who does something first the top cat of the hierarchy. Everyone should be allowed to their thing in their own way without constantly having to be compared to those who have done similar stuff earlier. Besides, repetition is very, very important. I myself have no conception of evolving as a musician or that I’m going somewhere. I think this holds true for many noise artists. My technique has become somewhat more refined, my articulation is clearer, but I’m still circulating the same ideas I had when I was 16. There’s no ambition of getting anywhere. As long as I’m allowed to my thing and learn something from it, I’d be more than happy.

C: You mention hierarchy. Art forms that might seem free and anarchistic from the outside, tend to be hierarchic once you get on the inside.

L: Two things come to mind. First: When something gets produced over and over, parameters like “good/bad” and “right/wrong” come into play. But I don’t relate to those parameters. I listen to music I find interesting, which I can learn something from — even though it’s not my favorite music. Then secondly: Humans have a tendency to be tribal, but to gather around a consensus is to detach oneself from the responsibility of being an individual, thinking human being. I see the same type of mechanisms in noise communities.

I’ve pretty much dodged all of that. I began as a cultural hermit up in the north of Norway, and has always been autonomous. Internet didn’t exist back then, so I did everything by mail and established a steady working pace. I’m used to work alone. Probably, if you’d put me on a deserted island with a tape recorder and a microphone, I’d still be doing my thing. And I don’t care too much about what people think. You can’t control what people think anyway. 

Noise musicians who have entered the scene the last 20 years or so are much more based around social media, where success is measured in immediate response, likes and recognition. That’s an unlucky turn of events and results in a lot of boring noise. When we work on something or release something, it should first and foremost be a way for us to approach our work from a different angle.

The last couple of years I’ve tried to make my work into a personal practice. I need to do it for myself , and whatever might come from the outside world is just a bonus. It’s not that I am renouncing the community I am a part of, or that communities per se are redundant: The social aspect of what we’re doing is important. At the same time it should be OK to not fit in, and above all not run away from the responsibility we have as individuals.

C: Is noise making the world a better place?

L: The problem is that we’re tirelessly grasping for happiness. We’re not happy, and those of us who are doing art are definitely not happy. I’m not talking about the “suffering artist”, just that artists are not seeking happiness in their work. Artists are seeking meaning. The want for happiness is dangerous and impossible. 

The subversive quality of noise is interesting in that respect. Any well functioning system needs to have something pushing or going against itself. It makes the system come alive, and it also justifies the system’s existence. A society with subversive forces would be a totalitarian, fascist regime. Noise is subversive because there is so much freedom and nuances embedded in it.

C: I am fond of saying that the piano is a great instrument, but a bad analogy for life. There’s a lot to be found between the black and white keys.

L: Life is the everyday, not the tops. The clue is to find meaning in our everyday activity, and I try to nurture the everyday in what I’m doing. I consider myself extremely lucky to have noise being an integrated part of my daily work, and all the adventures it has brought me. That makes me very humble.