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Jan Bang: Head, Shoulders, Hips, Knees and Toes

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When it comes to organically integrating modern technology into music, few countries are innovating to the degree of Norway, and at the epicenter of that country's forward-thinking approach to melding improvisation with jazz and Norwegian traditionalism—not to mention contemporary classicism, pop, ambient and more; truly any and all musical markers—is producer/remixer/sampler Jan Bang, who has just released his first album as a leader, ....and poppies from Kandahar (SamadhiSound, 2010).



Bang, from his home base in Kristiansand at the southern tip of the country, has been part of a remarkable musical movement since around the mid-1990s, in collaboration with a number of other like-minded artists including trumpeters Arve Henriksen and Nils Petter Molvaer, pianist Bugge Wesseltoft, guitarist Eivind Aarset, singer Sidsel Endresen and sound sculptist/producer Erik Honoré. Together with Honoré, Bang co-directs Punkt, a festival like no other, and one that has expanded from its annual event in Kristiansand at the end of each summer (2010 will be Punkt's sixth year) to include festivals abroad, including England and Germany, with plans in the works for Estonia in 2011, as well as dates in the United States and possibly Canada.

Punkt's founding philosophy—and what has created a tremendous groundswell of international attention for a festival that, at its Kristiansand base, can accommodate no more than 500 people at any given performance—is Live Remix. For three days, festival goers alternate between the main hall in Kristiansand's Agder Theatre, where they hear performances ranging from classical composer Gavin Bryars to Fourth World progenitor (and, in many ways, Punkt forefather), trumpeter Jon Hassell. Immediately following each performance, a quick trip downstairs to the dimly lit musical laboratory of Alpha Room—in contrast to the stunning stage designs of the main hall shows—is where the real action happens, as a live remix of the performance takes place, with other musicians (often playing together for the first time) interact with the remix. It's a thrilling experience, one that can truly change perceptions of what music is, and what it can be.

But before there was Punkt—a festival so important that, were it his only contribution to modern music, it would be enough—Bang created a concept even more groundbreaking. Coming, as he does, from a background steeped in the soundscaping of artists like Brian Eno, David Sylvian and, indeed, Jon Hassell, Bang was deep in the remix culture of the late 1980s/early 1990s. But just as keyboardist/prouducer/Jazzland Records head Wesseltoft provided inspiration for Eivind Aarset's distinctly un-guitaristic approach, so, too, did he push Bang into an innovation so profound, that it's completely altered the concept of how technology can be used with contemporary music. With Live Sampling, Bang becomes another improvising musician onstage, except his instrument is something less conventional—and, for some, very controversial—a black box of electronics, an AKAI Remix 16 sampler.



Chapter Index
  1. Live Sampling?
  2. But First, Some Keyboards
  3. Innovation Personified / Punkt Emerges
  4. An Improvising Instrument
  5. Cartography
  6. Live Performances, Programmed Beats
  7. ....and poppies from Kandahar
  8. Trust


Live Sampling?

"We'd just met for the first time, in the mid-'90s," as Bang describes his first encounter with Wesseltoft, "and he said to me, 'I'm putting together a band, and I'm interested in getting someone to do the electronics, what can you do?' I was thinking that I just had this new sampler, the AKAI sampler that was given to us in the studio, by the company, to try out, and I said to Bugge, 'Well, what if, instead of sampling off records, I sample your musicians onstage?' And he said, 'Wow, that sounds cool,' and so we tried it, and it worked really, really well. Then I realized that this is something totally new, something that had never happened before. This was something that pushed the music onwards and forward. So we just continued; I worked with Bugge for a few years after that."

It sounds both simple and complex on paper: sample every musician on stage, by getting a sound feed from their instrument into the sampler, and in real time, listen, grab, process and feed sounds being made by individual musicians back to the group, pushing them in new directions, the same way that any improvising musician drives the ultimate shape of the music. A fundamental characteristic of improvising musicians is listening to what is going on around them, and intuitively responding with contributions that spontaneously redirect the music, sometimes subtly, other times more significantly. But what if your instrument was all the instruments? That's what live sampling can mean: at one moment you're a trumpeter; another, a bassist; yet another, a drummer. But in all cases you're also your own instrumentalist, your sampler being the controller that allows you to reshape whatever sounds you are hearing into something new, whether it's a loop, a sound wash or a sound pitch shifted down two octaves to become something much bigger than its origin.

"It's about grabbing what you're after, or what think you're after," explains Bang. "It's very physical, but it's all about the subconscious, what you find interesting in the moment. So it doesn't have to be something that is familiar—where you sample a whole phrase and find something within. It's more like I do the sample, and that is what I have. I don't work that much with skipping parts and finding an actual note or phrase; that takes too much attention and too much time, and would draw me away from the momentum; from the moment. And I need to be in the moment—that's where I am—and to be in the moment but to still think of what happened in the past, where are we now and where can I put this thing into the future. It always interests me. Even now, after all these years, working with the same stupid machine; and yeah, it's the same box, I just bought my fifth one, on eBay."

Achieving innovation for Bang meant years spent working in a variety of scenes, honing an expansive palette of musical styles and textures, but it all started much more simply. "I was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1968, to Norwegian parents. I still have dual citizenship," Bang explains. "My father died there in 1969, a car accident, and so the family went back to Norway and Kristiansand, where my mother was from. My mother used to play a Phonola [player] piano with a paper roll—so it was kind of the first sequencer. She played Brahms, Schubert, Beethoven, Grieg...all the classical 'drawing room favorites,' as I call them. But, while I was growing up, I was listening more to disco, R&B; that was what I was interested in.

"And then a change happened, by accident really," Bang continues. "I was working in a record store, one that imported 12" vinyl, and mostly from London, so we had the fresh material from dance music, from both the UK and the States, and there was this 12" by David Sylvian, called "Red Guitar," from Brilliant Trees (Virgin, 1984), and that changed the way I listened to music. I was listening to more American music at the time, and this was totally the opposite—a more European aesthetic, more inwards than outwards-looking. With that, I became more curious and found more music that led me to Jon Hassell (who was involved with Brilliant Trees), and Scott Walker, the American singer that was based in Europe."

That ....and poppies from Kandahar has been released on Sylvian's SamadhiSound label is no coincidence, but is the kind of opportunity that happens rarely for most artists—to work with others who have been so seminal in their own evolution. Then again, Bang is also currently a member of Hassell's recording and touring group. It's also but one example of Bang's "just go for it" attitude. "So, full circle," Bang says. "I'd been working with David on different projects, sending files—I had never met him in a studio—which started with Nils Petter [Molvaer]. David was doing a compilation of instrumentals [Camphor (Virgin, 2002)], and had asked Nils to do a remix. I said to Nils, 'If you are doing a remix of David Sylvian, I need to be on it.' Just like that [laughs]. Nils and I had been working closely for so many years, and it sort of felt natural. That led to other different things, and I had just finished producing Arve Henriksen's Chiaroscuro (Rune Grammofon, 2004) with Erik [Honoré], and so I said to David, 'here's an album that you're gonna like,' and he listened to it, and said 'This is, by far, the album of the year,' and so that connected him with Arve. It all comes down to people, and things that you hear about; you hear about something interesting, and suddenly it makes a difference."

But First, Some Keyboards

Bang's instrument of choice may be a sampler, but he did play more conventional instruments at one time. "I actually started playing violin, and then I turned to keyboards," says Bang. "Making songs, like kids do. I eventually started working with Erik in '86, when I was about 17; we both lived in Kristiansand, which was a different scene than in Oslo. Oslo was sort of a rock scene, but we were more into different things. I remember Brian Eno told me that his albums sold disproportionately in Norway—more sales per capita than anywhere else—and more sold either in the north, in Tromsø, or in the south, in Kristiansand. There was always this search for something different."



But while Bang is now more closely affiliated with improvisation—and, consequently, the jazz world—his exposure to the music was minimal until relatively recently. "I think that the only connection I had to jazz was through my uncle, who was a jazz pianist and had his own quartet in the '40s," Bang explains. "But I didn't really listen to jazz; I think I had Domino Theory (Columbia, 1984) by Weather Report. But I didn't listen to [Miles Davis'] Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1969) until Bugge introduced me to it, probably in the mid-'90s. But, of course, I came to know later that both Jon [Hassell] and Brian [Eno] were hugely influenced by Bitches Brew, and also by [Davis'] In a Silent Way (Columbia, 1969), especially when it comes to Brian's ambient pieces. The good thing about continuing to do what you're doing is to see the connections between people and your own aesthetic, and where it derives from."

Rather than honing conventional chops, Bang and Honoré became increasingly interested in sound; in color, in texture, in timbre. "We were interested in sounds; making sound worlds, working with synths," Bang describes. "We spent hours just making the right sounds and making tapes. During some local performances, I was a singer and played synth, while Erik did the programming, the drum machine.

"And so, we started producing records together," Bang continues, "though eventually separately. Erik started working with Velvet Belly and Anne Marie Almedal, while I moved to Oslo and started working in the studio with guys from Tromsø, the electronic scene. They were more techno-based, and that was my introduction to that music, and house music. I was tired of writing traditional songs; I wanted a change, so I stopped singing and stopped making traditional songs, and became more interested in structure, in building constructions. Then I started producing local artists and remixing, which eventually led to a connection with the jazz scene through Bugge and Nils Petter, who were both interested in getting in touch with the electronic scene."

Molvaer and Wesseltoft became part of a burgeoning Norwegian jazz scene that looked to marry traditionalism—both culturally and with the American jazz tradition—with continuing advances in technology. Both were also part of a seminal year in Norwegian musical history. In retrospect, 1996-97 was a year that shook the musical world with the release of noise improv group Supersilent's Rune Grammofon debut (1997's 1-3), Wesseltoft's New Conception of Jazz (Universal Norway, 1996) and, in particular, Molvær's Khmer, which received additional international visibility through its 1997 release on the German ECM label. "I think it was a big thing for both ECM and Nils Petter," Bang suggests. "It would never have happened [Molvær's success], had it not been for ECM, and ECM would not have achieved such huge crossover success had it not been for Nils Petter; it was good for both."

Bang wouldn't record with Molvær until er (Sula, 2005), but by that time had been performing on the road with the trumpeter, alongside Eivind Aarset, turntablist Pål "Strangefruit" Nyhus and drummer Rune Arnesen. But he began working with Molvær's material as early as Khmer, doing a remix of that album's "Song of Sand" under the moniker "Mother Nature's Cloud & Shower Show," for Ligotage (ECM, 1998)—ECM's first (and last) CD-EP. "It was also on a very rare 12,"" Bang says. "I think it was [also] the first and last that ECM ever did. I think that [ECM label head] Manfred [Eicher] understood, while doing it, that this was not his market and he had to get out of it."

Innovation Personified / Punkt Emerges

If innovation doesn't come without risk and a cavalier intrepidness towards change, then Bang is innovation personified. "It's about following your own voice; what you're interested in at the moment. Instead of thinking about security—'Would this be a good career move'—I just think about what interests me. What I have come to understand—for example, I stopped touring with Bugge because I was tired of doing the same thing—is that I'm not interested in repeating myself. I want to push the limits and find new music that touches parts of me—my emotions, my intellect; hopefully, both. Then I came to understand that this is my business. That if I followed my own voice, I could have a life that was different, that was meaningful. It affects everything I do in life, including private things. The reason I moved back to Kristiansand, from Oslo, was because of Nina, my wife, and just to take the position of following your emotions. I just dropped everything I was doing in Oslo, and I never went back. That was the starting point of making decisions that weren't necessarily made out of convenience or necessity, but for a different reason. When the normal concerns of life don't apply—that's when you get to new places."

Bang's return to Kristiansand meant working more closely again with Honoré, and it was their collaboration that set the stage for Punkt six year later, in 2005, though there was still work to be done to get there. "The germination was something we called the Panavision Series," says Bang. "When I moved back to Kristiansand in 1999, Erik and I formed a concert series [that began] in 2000, where we invited different artists to come down to Kristiansand and do live sessions where I would sample things and Erik would do treatments. That was the beginning of the idea that would eventually become Punkt. We did it for maybe a year."

Bang describes Honoré's treatments as distinct and separate from his own live sampling. "What Erik did was to use different effects to create something that was sort of unnatural; to make perspectives out of a voice, or to take my samples and turn them into something else. A reprocessing way of working." Bang and Honoré released a couple of albums from the Panavision Series, including Going Nine Ways From Wednesday (Pan M, 2002), with singer Anne Marie Almedal singing words by local poet Nils Chr. Moe-Repstad.

"For that record," Bang says, "the only sound was her. It was like [Danish film director] Lars von Triers' way of thinking; you have a set of rules and you stick to those rules. In our case, the rule was to have the voice as the only sound source. But what started it all was Birthwish (Pan M, 2000), with Arve [Henriksen], and [pianist] Christian Wallumrod. That was the start of it all, because I had done a label deal with BMG. They probably expected more commercial albums, and my first concern was, as always, about the music and what interested me [laughs]. Instead of thinking in commercial terms, I've always thought of just following my own intuition, which has led me to working with a lot of fantastic artists I'd never have come across, had I just stuck with being a pop producer working for the major labels, which was my role before."

Panavision lasted about a year, with concerts that included Nils Petter Molvær, keyboardist Jon Balke, Swedish bassist Anders Jormin, Eivind Aarset, Bugge Wesseltoft and saxophonist/singer Bendik Hofseth. "That became the core of what would become Punkt," Bang says, "except for Jon, Anders and Bendik. One day, Erik and I were sitting at a café, thinking of how we could take this further, and the idea came: what if we had a point in this town [punkt is Norwegian for point], that was like a spider's web where the center point was this major spider? The idea was to have Brian Eno in the center, and music coming from different places like the church, the theater and other venues. We discussed all the technical aspects and decided that maybe it would be safer to do it, the first year, in a theater, using two different venues and, so, two different scenes. So we tried it out, and I remember, from the first, that the concept of Live Remix was the most important thing for Erik and myself. And so we kept that [the Live Remixes] free—free admission—so that people could easily go and check it out. Now, six years later, it's still free. It's the core of Punkt, the way that we improvise with electronics, and do these Live Remix sessions; based on what is programmed upstairs, our goal is to try to create new music downstairs."

The challenges of launching any festival are many. Strong arts funding in Norway at the federal level might not have been enough to get a festival like Punkt underway, but fortunately the city of Kristiansand had its own commitment to culture: Cultiva, an initiative that has allowed what, by North American terms, is a small town (population: less than 80,000) to have the kind of cultural breadth usually seen only in much larger cities. "Cultiva was the idea of one guy, who was a special advisor to the municipality, sort of a strategic advisor," Bang explains. "He came up with the idea of selling a percentage of shares in an electricity company, investing the money and allowing the interest on that money to go into an account that could be used for culture in Kristiansand. In 2006 that amounted to about 40 million Kroners a year (6.3 million USD). They've used this money on different projects [including providing start-up funding to Punkt for its first three years], and on the new theater that will open in 2012 [more than double the capacity of the current Agder Theatre], so we'll have a big Punkt there in 2012. We're also working with Brian Eno to do a project there."

It only took a couple of years for Punkt to gain international attention, thanks to bringing journalists from around the world to become a part of the festival. And they are a part of it, as Bang, Honoré and the entire Punkt staff view the festival as a growing family of musicians, journalists, friends and other professional colleagues. It's a festival that, in its sheer transparency, is like no other. And it's now a moveable feast, with other festivals inviting Punkt, as Germany's Enjoy Jazz festival did in 2009, when it brought Punkt to Mannheim for a one-day festival-within-a-festival that featured performances by Jon Hassell Maarifa Street, Sweet Billy Pilgrim and Ensemble Modern, with remixes by artists including Bang, Honoré, Aarset, Endersen and J. Peter Schwalm. But it wasn't in the original plans, it just took off that way, as the festival took on a life of its own. "The idea was to do something that interested us as musicians and artists," says Bang, "something that we hadn't done before; to create new music. [We thought] it would be fantastic...like the world's best studio session."

Punkt has expanded over the years, incorporating other artistic disciplines, including collaborations like Punkt Kunst (with the town's Sørlandet Art Museum, where Brian Eno did his 77 Million Paintings for Punkt in 2008, Jon Hassell did his NEAR FAR—Bells in Kristiansand installation at the town church the same year, and pianist/manager Andreas Stensland Løwe began Punkt Elope, a pre-festival evening that shines a spotlight on some of the areas up-and-coming artists, in 2007. But as each new year approaches, how do Bang and Honoré decide how to program the festival?

The primary criteria for booking an artist as a main concert performer is, as Bang explains, "made from a decision as to whether or not there is enough material by the artist to allow it to work in a remix session; that's our first concern." And there are ideas that look good on paper but don't necessarily work well in practice. "We did one project, where there was no air, no stops; just full-on ambient concert," Bang continues. "For us—Sidsel, Erik and I—there was nothing to work with. Maybe, because when things are too similar to what we do ourselves, there is not enough material for us to change and use as our own sound, because we turn every performance—and the sounds that we sample out of that performance—into our own sounds...not necessarily on a legal level [laughs], but creatively.

"The reason why we wanted Ensemble Modern in Germany was because we knew them for their work with Frank Zappa, but also because I'm very much interested in the contemporary classical scene," explains Bang, "what's happened in the last century. I sample a lot of material from that period, from new composers, and I know that these sounds are very transparent—that you can take a remix into a new direction. Heiner Goebbels, [Toru] Takemitsu, [Iannis] Xenakis; in all of these things there's enough space for us to grab something and make a pattern, an atmosphere...different layers."

If programming the main concerts is about finding music that presents strong potential for remixing, then programming the remixes themselves becomes an even riskier proposition, but that's exactly as it should be. "It's a lot about chance," Bang says, "that you don't necessarily know it's going to work, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's like, 'This was OK and I understand the intention of it, but it didn't work.' I think it's better to take the chance than not. Better to have a failed experiment than a safe performance."

An Improvising Instrument

Taking chances has defined Bang's career from those days in Oslo in the mid-1990s. Looking back, it's clear that Bang had a clear vision, right from the very start. "What I understood, when I did that first concert with Bugge 15 years ago—at a central Oslo club, where people met from different genres—was that this [sampler] was a true improvising instrument," Bang explains, "because I got a new instrument every day, and there was no history. It's not like a keyboard, where I might find myself doing the same movements, predictable patterns. This is all about improvising, and doing it in the moment, so if I compare myself to a saxophonist, for example, I can't pick any licks from the history of saxophone; I can't play, say, a bebop phrase from Charlie Parker. So, because there wasn't a tradition for my instrument, but I could improvise with it, I could grab something [from a musician] and push that musician into doing something else. It's another way of working, like a producer in a live situation, kind of dragging the performance somewhere that appeals to me. And I think that for all of us—as musicians, as humans in general—I think it's good to be dragged into an environment that we're not familiar with, that we let go of certain aspects of our ego."



The challenge of avoiding predictable patterns when playing is one that every musician faces; even renowned players like guitarist Pat Metheny have signature phrases that crop up time and again—it's all too easy to fall back on the familiar, even in pursuit of the different. The idea of inventing an improvising instrument with no history is an exciting one, though with Bang 15 years into live sampling, he's now created his own history, and feels the need to find ways to shake things up. "I always have to try to find new ways of creating, to avoid repetition," he says. "That's also why—working with a group like Ensemble Modern or the Chamber Orchestra of Europe from a few years back, or the London Sinfonietta—working with a cello and to work with brass, or clarinet, pushes things forward."

And so, Bang and Honoré invite musicians to the various remixes at Punkt—oftentimes, musicians who have never met each other before, much less played together. The results vary—most often there's real magic, but occasionally the result is less, perhaps, than the artists were hoping for. But that's the nature of improvisation—risk—and if the destination isn't always a great one, the trip there almost invariably is.

Whether touring with Henriksen, Molvær or Jon Hassell, Bang's approach to Live Sampling continues to be unique, largely because he has spent so much time in the studio over the past quarter century, gaining an intimate understanding of the nature of sound, color and texture. "The most challenging thing for me is to work with the human voice," says Bang, "because if you change the pitch, for example, it very easily becomes like Mickey Mouse [laughs]. So you have to treat it in a different way, or find samples that are more closed, where you have a voice with a lot of air. Like this vocal piece by [classical composer György] Ligeti, where everything is like [sings]. This is a sound that's more closed and so it's possible to work with it in different pitches and it still sounds good. Or use, say, a Chinese voice; Asian voices that are more nasal, those can also work in octaves.

"For me, piano is maybe the easiest thing to work with because it works in any pitch," Bang continues. "You can pitch it two octaves down or up and it will still sound brilliant. It's percussive, it's chords and it's melody, so it's all these different things that you can work with. I understand [pianist] Cecil Taylor, when he speaks of the piano as a percussive instrument first and foremost. Guitars and strings are also very good for me to work with; that's why I really enjoy working with Eivind [Aarset]. We talk a lot about ideas, about new ways of working. I always have these interesting conversations with Eivind, trying to find new ways of working together."

No surprise, given that Aarset, while working with a more conventional instrument, has become one of the world's foremost improvising guitarists, creating sounds that are beyond the pale of guitar orthodoxy. A combination of extended techniques, rich harmonic sensibility, and a similarly seamless technological integration as Bang's make him an ideal musical partner, whether touring together with Molvær or Hassell, or with Henriksen, performing music from and inspired by the trumpeter's remarkable 2008 release, Cartography (ECM).

Cartography

While Cartography is considered, by many, as a follow-up to Henriksen's Chiaroscuro, Bang begs to differ. "It was a different approach," he says, "because Chiaroscuro was based on live recordings with Arve, myself and Audun Kleive as a trio, then we took those tapes back into the studio. Most of the recordings were very good, but on tracks like 'Opening Image,' the only thing we had was a minidisc recording, recorded at a very low level so there was a lot of noise on it. I remember when Erik and I were working on that piece in post-production, rather than trying to take the noise out, we added to it. If there is a problem, just use it; 'OK, there's a hiss; let's make that hiss dynamic and add things to it.'"

Unlike Chiaroscuro, which worked with existing performances, Cartography was built from the ground up—and represented an entirely new way of composing, as well as the idea that it was not necessary to bring everyone together in the same room to make the recording. "We started working on Cartography three years before it came out," explains Bang. "What I do is I make tracks; I compose pieces and then I send them to different people. If I think, 'OK, this would sound good for Nils Petter,' then I send [the file] to him, he plays trumpet on it, sends it back, and [then] I mix it."

Some of the pieces for Cartography were originally intended for other artists. "'Before and After Life,' for example; that was originally intended for [saxophonist] Jan Garbarek," Bang continues, "because I did a show with him at the opening of the National Library in Oslo [in 2005] and it was kind of a big thing; it was also broadcast on a big screen outside the library. But Jan wanted to do a piece from Dis (ECM, 1977), or one of his other older albums, and so we did that instead. And so I thought, 'This might be something good for Arve.'"

Cartography was critically well-received around the world. Henriksen and Bang continue to tour the project, sometimes as a duo, sometimes in a trio with Aarset, and, occasionally, in an even larger configuration, such as at Molde Jazz 2009, where the trio was joined by percussionist Helge Norbakken. Amongst its many outstanding tracks, "Recording Angel" is one of the best pieces of music that Bang and Henriksen have created together to date. "I created the whole instrumental from the start," Bang explains, "and then I invited Arve to play trumpet on it. It was built from a recording by an American composer named [Alan] Hovhaness. I used a fragment from one of his recordings [sings] but I used it in different pitches to create a kind of net of different strings. I used it for the bass, a couple of octaves down—just filtering the top out of it—so you have the basic song [sings]. I think I worked with the track for a couple of days, and then we did a live session with [classical vocal group] Trio Mediæval at four o'clock in the morning at a place called The End of the World. It's on the east coast of Norway, and during the sound check at 3 o'clock they sang this 'Oi me Lasso,' an old mediaeval song that's also on one of their albums [Words of the Angel (ECM, 2001)].

"So I recorded it on my Dictaphone and just tried to find a place for it within 'Recording Angel,'" Bang continues, "and I think that all these different elements together resulted in something that I never grow tired of; I think it will stick with me as one of my favorites from my own repertoire."

Bang's Dictaphone—a primitive recording device [using tape], originally used to record dictation for later transcription—is just one more unusual instrument in his arsenal. "That's a trick I took from Holger Czukay, who used to work with David Sylvian," says Bang. "I remembered how David used to say that the Dictaphone recordings that Holger brought to the table were more powerful than any power chord in the world, because they had a distinct sound that created other worlds. It creates a lot of tension, despite being a crappy sound and not necessarily at high levels. You don't have to play it loud, but still, it creates all these emotional things."

Live Performances, Programmed Beats

Bang also brings his Dictaphone to .... and poppies from Kandahar. An album whose list of samples actually exceeds the list of "live" musical performances, it's a logical follow-on to Cartography, another example of the collaborative nature of this group of Norwegian artists, and their egoless approach in getting their music out to the world. "For me," Bang says, "Cartography and poppies are two albums made in the same way. The first has Arve's name on it, and the second one has my name on it. They could easily have been swapped, and that, in itself, is interesting to me. To work with different artists, and sometimes put my name on it, sometimes put their names on it, and still just feel that it's good music. To create something that is, especially for a record, completely different from a live document."



While Henriksen has been touring Cartography and Bang will be touring poppies, there's always the matter of how a live show can be differentiated from a studio construction. One subject that many artists discuss is whether or not live performances should even be recorded and released. Some, like ECM recording artist Stephan Micus, have intentionally not released live albums because they believe a performance is something to be experienced in real time once, and once it's over, it's gone, never to be heard again. Even when live recordings are made, they are, by their very nature, different from the actual experience, with three-dimensional soundscapes, created during post-production, inherently different than what someone hears sitting in the concert hall.

Still, in the world of improvised music, there's a strong argument for recording and releasing shows that are particularly compelling, if for no other reason than ensuring a permanent document exists. Even with five years of Punkt and dozens of live remixes, Bang and Honoré have released only one album: Live Remixes, Vol. 1 (Jazzland, 2008), which contains two live remixes, from two separate years of Punkt, featuring Sidsel Endresen and Jon Hassell. "For us it was to have a document of two performances that were very special," Bang says. "I don't go back and listen to that record because I was involved in it, but I still think it could be important, as a document, for Norwegian music."

That said, Bang still believes there's something to be said for the unique nature of each live performance. "I think that in these times—where everything is so accessible, where we can feed things everywhere, where you can hear music from every obscure artist from the '70s, where everything is there for us and we can Google everyone—you still can't be at every place at every time. If you want to see Punkt, you have to go to Punkt; you have to live it, you have to go to those concerts to be able to get that information, that experience. I think that's a good thing about the live concert situation, at least for artists who do creative things, who dare to do these things."

In performance, Bang is a visual performer; even when the music around him seems abstract, ethereal, ambient, he moves to some internal rhythm that only he, perhaps, can hear. "For me it's all about rhythm," says Bang. "That comes from working with machines, and trying to make those machines live as organic instruments—to make that stupid instrument, that box that contains nothing, live. To make life inside that instrument. It comes from working with that kind of attitude. This is actually something I learned from Per Martinsen, a Norwegian producer and pioneering techno artist who was, at the beginning of the '90s, part of the first wave of European techno. That was very much linked to Carl Craig and Derrick May and Detroit techno; they certainly knew how to make those machines live.

"Before that, people used synthesizers and drum machines to make demos," Bang continues. "And then they asked the bassist to come into the studio and play the bass part, and a drummer to play the drum part—but if they couldn't afford a drummer they'd just stick with what they had. So you had a lot of bad programming going on. But these guys [May, Craig, Martinsen], they worked with machines as the end result, meaning that they were finding life within these instruments, and that was my start—thinking rhythmically with my instrument and how to program something that is alive, that is funky, that is human, that is bodily. So even working with ambient sounds, to me it's all about movement, all about finding the rhythm in itself. I suppose that, because I work with fragments and work a lot with loops, there's rhythm within each phrase, and I try to find the beats within each sound. This sounds quite abstract, but for me it's very real."

Of course, technical advancements have removed some of the mechanical feel of programmed beats, and have allowed artists to inject some of the same imperfections that make live percussionists feel natural and organic. Still, to achieve the same result requires a lot of effort, and a lot of experimentation to hone it as a craft. "Technically, I work with different elements, different parameters," Bang explains. "I work with pitch, to find the right pitch for each sound. Going back to when I was a kid, working with my first sampler, and later, when I used to spend an entire day making five banks of sound, and within those banks, let's say there were seven-to-ten different sounds in each bank. I had a rule that I had to make five tracks each day. I started at nine in the morning, and finished at six [laughs]. Then I started working at sampling sounds and finding the perfect pitches for each sound, so then I knew that if I pitched this instrument down, an octave or even a few notes, it would sound huge—it would sound so much better than the original pitch. Or that that sound works well backwards."

Bang is an especially motivated artist, who puts in a full work day, each and every day. "It's got nothing to do with getting inspired," Bang asserts, "it's about getting work done. I just moved my studio from where it was for the last 10 years to a new space in Odderøya [a small island off the Norwegian coast, near Kristiansand], with a view of the ocean and the woods. It's just beautiful and it changes every day. So I go to the studio and work until 4 o'clock in the afternoon, then I pick up my kids, go home and make them dinner. To me, that's the basic; there's nothing more mystical than that."

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