Search Forever!

"Search Forever!" was composed and recorded in 2001.
But most of the work on the compilation "The Book Of Parallel Worlds" was composed when I was about 14 years old. 

Even though "Search Forever!"  was already recorded, I  re-recorded the Wurlitzer (electric piano) and the drums, since they originally were performed on samplers, and I wanted the real thing. 

Actually I ended up recording the drums for the entire compilation in a couple of hours at 4am. But that's another story. 

The whole piece is pretty progressive and crazy, and one reason for this is my young age when I was writing it, which is kind of the point with releasing early music here, without this project, this compilation would never have been released. This holds true for most of the material released this (second) year. 

The Making Of A Scar

With this song, we're approaching the end of the concept album “The Book Of Parallell Worlds” 
The next song will be the last one presented from this work. 

There are a couple of sequences and some production stuff that will be exclusive to the album, and I hope to release it soon. However there are new songs and music projects, that needs to be done.

The song was written for, and rehearsed with my band “Woo”, but this is not a "rehearsal recording”. Though I wanted it to have some of that raw and unpolished sound.  

Most of the songs in this compilation (and frankly, most songs released this year) was recorded from scratch.
But I had some good early recordings of a bunch of the tracks here. This is a blessing and a curse. At one hand, it is great to have the feel of the original composition at an early stage, since that is most often what I will go for. 
On the other hand, it would be so much simpler to re-record them without any thoughts about these things. But that would not be "biographical enough" to my taste. This biographical approach also gives me a huge variety of sounds to pick from, since I've been making songs my entire life, and always been on the move, musically.

It is not the variety in itself that matters to me though. It's some kind of originality.  When a song is made, it instantly becomes yesterdays news to me, so I need to do something different or my work feels irrelevant. 

I do keep things in a certain perspective for this project though, and I use a great deal of time on how it its supposed to play out in the end.  So in that regard, "The Book Of Parallel Worlds" is just another tiny part of the 5 year long album puzzle. 

Father Of Rain, Daughter Of Light

This song marks, in many ways, the beginning of the composition "The Book Of Parallel Worlds" (as a concept album).

The song had originally many references to the other tracks on the album (and vice versa), but with time, these references gradually "vanished". A bit like a mould or a scaffold, you take away, when the work is finished. 

I was pretty merciless in the editing stage with this song , as it was originally over 7 minutes long. Many themes and original parts that had been there for decades, was simply cut away. 

Even though the whole work (played in sequence) gives a bigger experience than the sum of its parts, I wanted every song to be totally independent and not “cannibalise" each other, or lean too heavily on the main concept of the work itself. If that makes sense. 

Alternatives To Reason

With this song we go deeper into the concept of the work "The Book Of Paralell Worlds”.
This "world" is quite different from the two preceding ones, with more tempo, time, and tonal changes, than actual words in the song. 

The arrangement was also made so that the rhythmic density goes down when the intensity of the song rises. Meaning that the beats become slower when the rest of the arrangement gets faster. 

So in general, I tried to make a set of "nature laws", for the song that’s a bit twisted in microstructure, but still acts natural. Which was fun. 
 
The main theme for this work, is about the fact that we all live in many parallel worlds at the same time, both personally, geographically and culturally. But they are all different views on the same story. 

Another world will be presented next time!

Games

The song "Games", is part two of the concept album “The Book Of Parallel Worlds”.
It’s a bit difficult to tell too much about individual songs in this work, without referring to the whole piece (which isn’t released yet).

 I’m playing all instruments on this song, and the rest of the album as well. I would like to have Audun Havåg and Geir Arne Ose with me on this, for “old times sake” since we played it frequently together at the time I composed it.  It is still both challenging and fun to play all instruments on a record, but it’s not very social. 

The song starts with four eBows (electric guitar bow) performed on an acoustic guitar. Instead of pressing the string against the guitar neck, the fingers are just mildly touching the string, (without pressing it into the frets of the guitar) making it possible to glide up and down the string, like the guitar had no frets.  

I originally thought this piece would be one of the easier ones to produce in this concept album, and it probably was, but it still took me a month longer than expected to finish it. Sometimes the simplest things  are the hardest. 

Don't Hide Underground

"Don't Hide Underground" is the first song from a larger piece/concept album called "The Book Of Parallel Worlds" I will try to present the entire album over the next months here. 

I remember vividly the day I presented this song to my band "Woo".
The whole band had just moved to Bergen (from our small hometown, Ørsta) and was looking for a rehearsal space, as several shows were coming up.
Our good friend and manager Hans Petter Ulstein, invited us to use his
dorm room for practice, which required the crazy plan of building new plaster walls (with isolation and all) over the excising walls. And further cover them with acoustic carpets. After the build, we rehearsed there for a rough week, before we had to take down the walls again.

This was just a glimpse into the madness to come in the following years in the quest for a music career. 
(With the mindset: If you want it bad, you have to be the craziest of them all). 

This is also a good time to give credit to Hans Petter Ulstein and his great involvement in the band. He was responsible for media, marketing, web presence, as well as show logistics (and much more).
I think of him as a key member in our band. We simply would not have accomplished the things we did, without him. 

Much of the work on the concept album "The Book Of Parallel Worlds" was started on many years before this song was sorted out, but concepts like these has a tendency to change over time anyway. Many of these projects took so long to finish, that I'm actually quite hesitant (or embarrassed)  to give any clues on how bloody long actually it took me. 

Horizon F185

"Horizon F185" is an improvisational piece recorded February 18th 2005, hence the name.
I have at least 1000 recordings of improvisations like this, or “meditations" as I like to think of them. 
These are, of course performed on different instruments, with or without my voice, and in different moods. 

Common to them all, is that they have no planned purpose, and they were never intended for anyone to listen to. 
So, I thought it would be cool to release at least one of them here.  As a kind of musical reality show!

Anyways I think it’s suiting to show a glimpse of that side in my musical biography. 
 
Since they are all quite long, I just picked one random improvisation, without listening to others. I decided that I would not edit out anything or do too much with it, since that kind of defeated the purpose of releasing it. 

Improvised music has a way of reaching other “places" than composed music, and often being more extreme (in so many ways). This is also true in concert form, where you can create a mood that reflects both the audience and the artist at that time. And I just love that.  

When that is said, I’m  not particularly happy with this improvisation (or unhappy) it’s  just another “meditation”. It is honest, with no regards to anything else.