The very beginning [1992-1993]

So then, where to start?

Back in the late eighties in our home town of Drammen (Norway) there was a large group of people who listened to all sorts of dark (and not so dark) electronic music typically issued by PIAS/Mute/Volition/Nettwerk/Antler etc. Some veered into the "industrial" and I guess I was one of them at that point heavily influenced by everything from ritual music to electronica to pure noise.

Previously, during the summer of 1990 some friends and myself on a Z'Ev/Einstürzende Neubauten trip brought some horns and various other paraphernalia to an abandoned factory which is now the locally famous Union Scene and recorded some almost purely percussive improvisations under the guise of C.C.D.D. Metacübin. This resulted in a ninety minute mass of mechanic H-beam mayhem dubbed "Xhalc Lauret" - quickly forgotten and destined to dwell in a cardboard box where the original tapes still lie to this day. The people involved in this were T. Hoel, S. Tolpinrud and myself. I may or may not make an edit here and place a snippet of this as I seem to remember a track which worked pretty well, placing a couple of microphones in an extremely large metal tank drumming on the sides while playing a horn into it from above. All in all it was an important formative experience with sound and it's potential.

A couple of years passed and one sun-filled afternoon Alx invited me to his place to check out his synthesizers and recording gear. Needless to say we immediately started creating and recording using some, by today's standards, very primitive sound sources. At the outset we had no computer synchronizing the MIDI-data, so the internal sequencer on our borrowed Roland W-30 digital sampling workstation did a pretty good job of doing what we wanted it to do. He'd borrowed the W-30 from a friend of his called Andreas (not of Conetik fame!) with whom he had been involved in a musical project a few years already. Alx had also bought an Oberheim Matrix-6 which still remains one of the most amazing synthesizers ever, the manual making a staggering point of the limitless possibilities available to us. In addition to this we were using a Roland Juno 106 and some effect machines like the Alesis MidiVerb and a Korg echo machine. And samples. Many samples. Some from field/home recordings, some from television, some from movies or most any source you'd care to mention. The result of this was not always very good, but it was a start. I think around thirty tracks have been rescued from old tapes. At the time we called ourselves "Die Pleite" - which was intended as a working title for whatever came next. The following track is the first we ever made and is completely improvised.



Time passed, music got made, connections as well.

Being a part of a gang of EBM fanatics we had of course heard about this really good retro EBM band (actually several bands in one!) hailing from Oslo called Anstalt. This band had like 10 members and was an umbrella group for several internal projects evolving with time and mood a few of which were Agenda, Murderous, Genetic Twins, Beta Frequency etc. We met up with T.E.Krogh (TEK) at a party, tapes were exchanged and within a short amount of time we were installed as part of the group. I guess it's not an exaggeration that we brought a more agressive atmosphere to the band. Back then Anstalt consisted of T.E.Krogh (Beta Frequency/Oceania Indigo/Zomorodia/Sinus/Son Tarjeiav/The Order/Oslo Synth Band etc.), Eskild Trulsen (Beta Frequency/Superskill/Havana Acid Club etc.), Jørgen Aase (Agressiva/Hexacon), Truls A. Bakken (Industrial Heads etc.), Rune Kruse (Zomorodia etc.) as well as Alx and myself.

TEK was also in the process of setting up a label, which eventually manifested itself in Psycho Active Records who released four CDs of incredibly independent Norwegian electronic music from 1994 to 1999. During the first year of Die Pleite being introduced to Anstalt a lot of things happened. We tried with variable success to cross-breed Krogh's very distinctive style of programming with our own which was perhaps not too honed at that point. Some tracks became very nice, like Strych 9, which ended up on Dunkelheit's compilation CD "The Re-Incarnation of the Sun" alongside some pretty great artists like Remyl (our heroes!) Red Harvest and Piledriver.

The original version Strych 9 (to be posted here later on) was programmed by TEK and Alex sometime in 1993 with some hastily prepared lyrics written by me. At the recording studio we were having some major problems getting the engineer to make distorted vocals without feedback being the main result, so after some trial and mostly error I decided "Fuck this shit!" and winged a vocal approximation instead with only the slightest hint of distortion audible. There was only one vocal take which is all it took. Somewhere Tarjei has a video-tape of the entire session in which a sizeable number of Anstalt tracks were committed to the Ampex reels =).

Courtesy of the Anstalt soundcloud, listen to Strych9 here:


The next post will cover our decision to split our (Alx and mine) efforts in two (later more) parts - Anstalt and Atropine - which was born in 1994.