Ducks Battle Satan

Lasse told me that he made the Quiet North to make a better  version of what he thought The Great Silence was lacking. On the face of it, this is a half hour long, dirty slab of layered, extreme distortion. I’ve got loads of this on my ipod so why does this work for me  in a way that no other noise record has for a while? There is this undulating texture within the distortion itself which is really hard to explain. So on a break from contemplating The Quiet North I read an interview with jazz drummer Andrew Cyrille in which he says “ You can look at the water flowing and it doesn’t have any division but it’s rhythm ….Rhythm is just nothing but motion and movement.”

What on the face of it seems a bit simplistic takes on a very different context when you hold it up to a pure noise record like this one. You see despite all of the  brain scrubbing ferocity, there is a type of rhythm in the pulsating distortion of The Quiet North. It may not be apparent from your first listen but I guarantee you it’s there. So if a type of rhythm defines what we call music, is The Quiet North music? I’m not going that far but it may in the scheme of things this may be as important a noise record as you  are likely to find. If there was any justice this will feature in many best of 2010 lists.

This entry was posted on September 14, 2010 at 12:14 am and is filed under Lasse Marhaug, Music, noise with tags Lasse Marhaug, Music, noise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.