#helge sten

[garadinervi]

Postreptilia, (2 x Vinyl/LP, Book), Produced by Ivar Orvedal, ORB 802LP, Orb Compendium, 2020 [Fonts In Use]

Contributors: Ivar Orvedal, Laura Marie Rueslåtten, Geir Sundstøl, Ingrid Haug, Ellmer Stefan, Rune Døli, Audun Strype, Helge Sten

Cover, Book, and Type Design: Modest [Rune Døli] and Ellmer Stefan, in close collaboration with Ivar Orvedal Fonts: Triptych Regular, Italick, Omnigraf

[nofatclips]

Go by Susanna and the Magical Orchestra from the album List Of Lights And Buoys

[burlveneer-music]

Trondheim Voices - Folklore - 9-voice choir sings pieces by Ståle Storløkken and Helge Sten (Hubro)

Trondheim Voices – Folklore (traditional customs, tales, sayings, dances, or art forms preserved among a people) What happens when two of Norway's foremost sound magicians use Trondheim Voices as a living instrument? Composed by Ståle Storløkken and Helge Sten Trondheim Voices: voices & percussion: Sissel Vera Pettersen (artistic director) Anita Kaasbøll Tone Åse Ingrid Lode Torunn Sævik Kari Eskild Havenstrøm Heidi Skjerve Siri Gjære Natali Abrahamsen Garner

[dustedmagazine]

Deathprod — Occulting Disk (Smalltown Supersound)

Photo by Kim Hiorthøy

OCCULTING DISK by Deathprod

Norwegian producer Helge Sten AKA Deathprod characterizes his new album of coruscating ambience Occulting Disk as “an anti-fascist ritual.” Whether said fascists are quaking as they listen to the tectonic plates of history and psycho-geography move, part and prepare to swallow their ahistorical asses, who knows? We hope so, but in the meantime Deathprod is back to torment them with the very darkness from whence they sprang. A stereophonic colonic if you will.

Recorded over seven years in Oslo, Reykjavik, Berlin, Cologne and Los Angeles, Occulting Disk certainly displays the ritual intensity of an exorcism as it moves at a glacially deliberate pace through each of its ten steps. At times Deathprod’s “Occultations” come on like sonic weapons dialed down just enough to prevent serious physical damage but threatening the ears and innards with what might happen if you were at the mercy of a less benign protagonist. Opener “Disappearance/Reappearance” sounds like a malignant pirate icebreaker bearing down with its foghorn turned up to 13. A baleful sarcophagus of hope almost too burdened by forlorn futility to float on.  Occultations “1” through “7” continue the onslaught utilizing higher frequencies to evoke apocalyptic insect swarms, souls drowning in Styx and the erosion of the inessential.  

Built from what Sten calls “Audio Virus” (also the name of his recording studio in Oslo) a collection of homemade electronics, filters, modulators, tape machines, Theremins and samplers, Occulting Disk is not a record to approach lightly. Often it seems deliberately constructed to hold the listener at arm’s length daring one to submerge oneself in its frozen depths.  The twelve plus minutes of the penultimate piece “Black Transit of Jupiter’s Third Satellite” is the aural equivalent of a scouring or a cauterization of nerve endings that sends one back into the world inured to its depredations. An 1890 account of this transit describes the satellite as “very dark” and charts its progress until it appears as “quite white … the dark speck has vanished. The satellite is whiter and brighter than the limb”* The ritual almost complete “Occultation 8”  is an almost soothing application of unguent to battered senses.   

A sage smudge stick this is not. Deathprod’s is a caustic cleansing that befits the evils abounding. The effect on fascists may be limited but I can tell you it freaked the hell out of the cat.  

Andrew Forell  

* Astronomical Journal of the Pacific (v2, no.11, 11/29/1890, pp292/293)

[plaindrunkenness]

[nofatclips]

Hold On by Stian Westerhus from the benefit compilation Slava Ukraini!

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Don't Come Around Here No More (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers cover) by Susanna, live at Kulturkirken Jakob in Oslo, Norway

[nofatclips]

All Your Wolves by Stian Westerhus from the album Redundance