Lasse Marhaug has for 35 years been one of Norway’s most prolific and active sound and visual artists. As a producer, studio engineer, curator, photographer, designer, filmmaker, composer, improviser, self-publisher and writer Marhaug has worked across a wide range of formats. Collaborators include artists like Joe McPhee, Merzbow, Jenny Hval, Okkyung Lee, Jim O’Rourke, Paal Nilssen-Love, Kevin Drumm and many more. Despite being involved in hundreds of releases Marhaug’s solo albums are more rare efforts, and ‘Provoke’ marks the fifth album on Smalltown Supersound, a 25 year long collaboration that started in the late 1990s.
‘Provoke’ is the follow up to 2021’s ‘Context', and is the first solo recordings Marhaug has recorded since he moved back to his native home in the Arctic, northern Norway. Marhaug states that moving north again has given him a sharper focus and that the album could be seen as a meditation on how growing up in this rural environment shaped his aesthetics and approach to sound, music and form. While it can be a harsh and cold climate, northern Norway also offers, he says, an ever-changing palette of light and is an incredible landscape. While the music is largely electroni, ‘Provoke’ also features sounds recorded outside in the winter, which the final track’s ‘Minus 14’ title is perhaps a giveaway. The album took a year to record and was mixed during the two-month’s Polar night season, a time where the sun does not cross the horizon.
The title ‘Provoke’ is like ‘Context’ an ambiguous word play. It means everything and nothing at the same time. Does noise music provoke anymore? Did it ever? What are its subversive qualities? One reference is the 1970’s Japanese photography magazine of the same name, an experimental small-press publication that with artists like Koji Taki, Daido Moriyama and Yutaka Takanashi at the forefront set out to subvert and find a new language for photography. The difference between photography in Tokyo in 1970 and electronic music the Arctic in 2024 is of course huge, but the radical attitude to form certainly shares common ground. Marhaug still does not consider himself a musician, but rather a visual artist that got sidetracked by the possibilities of sound.
Musically ‘Provoke’ follows up where ‘Context’ left off, with an elegant mix of angular electronic juxtapositions and horizontal lines. Marhaug is now working with a stronger emphasis on pulse and rhythmic constructions, as well as more tonal and (almost) melodic elements. This clarity and sense of design makes the music come across as more defined and luminous. The music is less of a dense layer of fog, yet Marhaug manages to create a feeling of great depth and three-dimensional space. ‘Provoke’ is a journey through the elements, rippling time space and displacing gravity, but also grounded and earthbound. Music both as architecture and landscape, sound that describes light.
‘Provoke’ feels like a landmark and high point in Marhaug’s already extensive catalogue.
