music: interview: Zweizz
Black Metal - Black Noise

Zweizz is a Norwegian musician who started out as a member of a Black Metal band and then, alongside that, began to produce Noise music. Mstation met him at a gallery event in Berlin and followed it up with this email chat where he tells us a little about Norway, Black Metal, and noisemaking.
www.myspace.com/zweizzmusick
www.myspace.com/umoral
www.myspace.com/fleurety
www.myspace.com/pronouncedsex

Please start by telling us about the facilities that most young Norwegians have for getting together, and for doing things like making music.

I guess you want me to tell you more about the Norwegian social democracy. By American standards this is typical leftist politics. What I was talking about was the state funded so-called youth clubs, where at least I was able to rehearse with my first black metal band Fleurety. We used to rehearse in one of those youth clubs along with lots of different bands, mostly dogdy rock bands that we would obviously hate, since we were black metal kids. So we would pay like the equivalent $10 each year for a proper rehearsal place with lots of room and a PA and the lot. These facilities vary depending on where you live, since Norway is divided into muncipalities and the standard of the facilities are different from place to place. Typically a rich muncipality governed by The Labour Party or The Socialist Party have better facilities, whereas those run by The Conservatives or parties more to the right end of the political spectrum have worse. Also: Did you know that the first album by Norway's most selling black metal band Dimmu Borgir "For All Tid" was recorded in a studio run by the muncipality of Oslo? (ED. No!)

interview continues below

When we asked you earlier about the prevalence of Metal in Scandinavia, you said that was the way you started out. Why do you think Metal is such a strong genre there?

I assume most people have heard about Norwegian black metal and the chruch burnings and killings that took place. I got into black metal in 1992, just half a year before all the media hysteria started revolving around Varg Vikernes and Euronymous. (The former killed the latter.) At that time black metal was the only interesting and mystical thing you could be into as a kid, and I feel very priviliged to have been a part of it all when it happened, even though I was at the very fringe of it all. Most of those central people in the black metal scene were five years older than me, which is a lot when you're fifteen. Anyway, the Norwegian black metal scene was very small in the beginning, with less than 20 bands, and most knew each other. Euronymous was a kind of strategist and figurehead of the scene, and there were two rules, seemingly conflicting: You had to conform and you had to be original. You had to conform to the dark lifestyle, you had to wear black clothes and spikes, and laughter and you were strangers. On the other hand you would not be taken seriously with a copycat and unoriginal band. So when it comes to Norway, a lot of the success of the Norwegian bands depend on these conditions that made people have to work hard to develop their own style within a very strict framework. That is not so much the case these days. There is no risk in playing in a boring band these days, so then people play in boring bands.

Please tell us about your Metal experience ... which is ongoing!

I still play in metal bands, like I've done since I was thirteen. I have two black metal bands, one is called Fleurety, the other is called Umoral. With Zweizz I integrate my metal background into electronic music. One guy called the music I make "necrotech". If you look at the cover of my first Zweizz album "The Yawn of the New Age" I try to communicate this through a pink and furry black metal logo, and I also have another record in the making with my good friend Joey Hopkins, where we also make use of black metal stylistic traits while making electronica. This relates to my upbringing in a way: black metal is worthless if it doesn't attempt to push the boundaries and stretch the rules.

Was there any particular road that led to making Noise music?

I got into noise music through listening to 20th century modernist composers like György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Edgar Varese. The latter is known for his definition "Music is organized sound", and when I listened to a lot of this music it struck me as a lot darker than the black metal music I'd been listening to. In 1996 i was part of the duo Aphrodisiac, and we released a noise album called "Nonsense Chamber". At this time I wasn't really aware that there was such a genre as noise music, and we called the stuff we made "noise which tends towards music", using cellos, radio noise, synthesizers, effect boxes, tape players and serial killer quotation samples. (And whatever other objects we could find to experiment with.) It would take until as late as 2001 until I realized there was a noise scene. This year Merzbow played in Norway, and my interest in noise music was renewed after that.

Actually, how'd you like to give us a definition of Noise music?

I think that in principle noise music is a superset of music, since all other music genres can be a part of noise music. But in practice this is not the way it works, since most noise music sounds like a huge waterfall run through a distortion pedal. But it can be more interesting. Like with most other genres, noise music has degenerated into a confusing mass of too many artists doing the same thing. Sometimes I am lazy and become one of these performers, but I try to work harder.

While some people might like to think that Noise music is a series of unpleasant sonic accidents, there can be, and usually is, a fair amount of craft that goes into creating it. What sort of things do you look at when you're creating something?

One of the most important aspects is the layering of sounds, another is the depth of sound. I like there to be a background and a foreground and everything in between. It is also important to have a broad range of sounds, and there has to be a lot happening, I am not so much into monotonous noise music. And well, when it comes to "accidents" -- that might not be a bad thing. Most noise music is improvised, and if you improvise there is not really such a thing as accidents, there is just flow and labour and the ability to be present in your own music, to be able to transform these accidents into an interesting narrative or exchange of ideas or maybe even a measuring of strength between performers. And that is not an easy task.

Could you tell us about the software you use?

Reaktor, Wavelab, Cubase, heaps of plugins, Audiomulch, Simsynth, some strange sound applications that only run on Linux like Ceres, Mammut and Granny. Recently I have been working with MatLab to perform signal transformations in the frequency domain that I don't really know of any other applications that can do. So in a sense I (with the help of very skilled friends) write my own software. I have a University degree in computer science, and a part of that is signal processing. I studied this to be able to write my own tailored software.

One of the problems with computer based music is that it can be hard to give people something interesting to look at. You use vocals to liven things up but what do you think about alternative sorts of controllers? What would you like to have in this way?

I have not yet had the time to work that much with alternative sound controllers, but I would like to do that in the future. There is a very interesting project going on at the University of Oslo where they make alternative controllers like sound balls and what not, and I'd like to team up with these people. One dream of mine is to have microphones or other devices installed into my body, so I could use my heart or digestive system to generate sounds. But at present I can't afford that :-( So I'll have to stick to more conventional performance art strategies, like video, projectors et cetera.

What have you got coming up?

My next goal is to play at Bleepfest in Paris. Apart from that: An album with Zweizz & Joey Hopkins, another album in August with the soft noise/ambient duo Pronounced "SEX", a split cassette with Zweizz and RU-486, some concerts/performances with the duo Zweizz & Homo Vinter, an album with the black metal band Umoral and some 7" EPs with my other black metal band Fleurety. And I bet even more stuff as well.

Thanks!

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