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Pan Gu, "Primeval Man Born of the Cosmic Egg"
As only their second performance together, the first consisting of a collaborative live show, the duo of Leslie Low (The Observatory) and Lasse Marhaug (Norway's undisputed king of noise), this improvised performance combines two distinctly different approaches to music and sound, but the combination makes perfect sense and pairs together powerfully.
The paring alone makes for an odd proposition, with Low's looped and processed guitar and voice intonations resulting in rich, warm melodies and drones, while Marhaug's brittle, but expertly manipulated electronic noises covering two very different sonic spectrums.The resulting songs are made all the better with this clash of sounds, and actually do sound very song-like in their consistency and structure.
"Silver Needle, Silver Dragon" begins with Marhaug's overdriven, waxy noise passages skittering above a morose passage of melody, resulting in a dark but not oppressive sound.The noise making for an appropriate accompaniment to the dirgey tones, not a drastic shift or distraction that it could be."Each Bay Its Own Wind" has a similar structure, mixing ghostly guitars and sputtering, electronic pulses that become a bit more harsh and jumpy as the piece goes on.
Some of the performances seem to lean more into Marhaug's world of dissonance than Low's melodicism:"Fleas Were The Ancestors of Mankind" keeps with the chirpy noises, pushed into shrill and brittle realms, but never getting too raw or abrasive.The throbbing, low register notes and crunchy noises of "Eggs and Emptiness" also only hint at melody but instead make for more of a showcase of the harsher electronic noises.
Both "Let the Old Philosopher Use You" and "Elixir of Death" go a bit further out into space.The former mostly reduces the traditional instrumentation to ghostly winds, focusing instead on fragmented outbursts and some bizarrely organic, monstrous cries."Elixir of Death" keeps the guitar mostly unprocessed, but with a more bleak, almost metal tone to it.The electronics are wetter and nastier, and the whole thing takes on some oddly structured electroacoustic tone before falling apart into a world of sputtering noise.
I am more familiar with Lasse Marhaug's overall body of work, and here he once again shows his unparalleled brilliance in controlling harsh and ugly noises and shaping them into rich and complex compositions.His contributions here are distinctly him, but compliment Leslie Low's more refined, traditionally musical elements quite well, making for a stark, yet fitting contrast.What could come across as simply feedback mixed with someone else's musical tracks instead makes for a taut, conceptually fleshed out collaboration that is brilliantly moody and diverse in its sound and structure.
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