DEATHPROD

Let Me Be Forever Animal

LP (Black Vinyl)

Boomkat Product Review:

Helge Sten soundtracks Edvard Munch’s lesser-known depictions of nature on this new Deathprod album, specially commissioned to accompany drawings in the final room of the ‘Trembling Earth’ exhibition at the Munch Museum in Oslo. It’s discomfiting, self-investigatory and open-ended work that channels Munch's painterly melancholia into gut-wrenching, vantablack dimensions.

The first exhibition to highlight depictions of nature in Edvard Munch’s work, ‘Trembling Earth’ culminates in a final room that brings together 11 early versions of the iconic paintings Munch created for the University of Oslo’s Aula (ceremonial hall) in 1916. Sten was commissioned to create a soundpiece to accompany the paintings, which he recorded using mid-70s studio technology, leaning into all the equipment’s inherent faults. “When I don't understand what this music is. I like that”, he explains.

Munch's alienating, self-conscious studies of the mind's opaque depths are perfect fodder for Sten, who's been serving up his own unique response to the twilit Northern European landscape for decades at this point. Here, he paints in measured, cryptically symbolic strokes with the help of his arsenal of home-made generators and processors, the "Audio Virus" he's been developing since he taped his spine-tingling 1991 debut 'Deep Throat Puke Orgasms'.

Sten’s tools are relatively simple, it's his process that's so intensely refined. There's no overwhelming distortion, or a constant low-end blare, instead he balances his elements so that each jolt rocks the senses - with every piercing squall of feedback, there's inevitably a somber dip into negative space. It makes for a highly enigmatic, expressionistic new work from one of our greatest living experimental composers.

An excerpt of an interview with Helge Sten with the Munch Museum:

WHEN YOU ENTER THIS ROOM, YOU ARE INSIDE THE PIECE

“The project was coloured by my experience of the finished paintings in the Aula, where they are hanging. The Aula feels like a church – classical architecture married with something more modernistic. I wanted to go back and work with some music where I was able to see these images afresh, and have a different experience. That was the key for how I came to make the music I did. There’s so much history and conventions within that space that it kind of destroyed my ability to see the imagery as it should be seen. I had to take ownership of how I perceive these images.

The main character of all this is basically due to digital processing, utilizing mid-70s music studio technology. Music equipment that has various faults, artefacts and strangeness. The sounds have a very organic life of their own. I often end up in a very different place from the initial ideas, which is where it starts to get exciting for me. When I don't understand what this music is. I like that. There have also been some restrictions on sound pressure levels inside the space, due to vibrations and the delicate works. So I had to also find a way to work with this whole piece which would work on the main level, but still have the emotional impact that it should have.”

LP (Black Vinyl) (0)