alog: unemployed

Alog's fifth album was recorded in a wide range of spaces and places -- from recordings of Dag-Are Haugan and Espen Sommer Eide as street musicians in San Francisco while touring, to scavenging old collections of 78 rpm records in the mining town of Bjørnevatn in the far northeastern part of Norway. From on-the-spot recordings of Sigbjørn Apeland's legendary collection of vintage harmoniums in the St. Jakobs Church in Bergen, to high-end capture of the unique sounds of Alog's many custom-built instruments in the studios of Notam in Oslo and BEK in Bergen. For a period of three years, Alog collected material from all kinds of sources, times and situations and made new songs that constantly push their creative freedom in unexpected directions. Alog was formed in Tromsø in the late '90s. While touring and composing over the past years, the duo has met a lot of unique musicians, and for Unemployed, they were invited to extend Alog into new constellations, whether it meant the soothing harmonium drones of Sigbjørn Apeland, the minimalist fiddle improvisations of the Sheriffs Of Nothingness (Ole Henrik Moe and Kari Rønnekleiv), the resonating everyday objects of the talented young sound artist Signe Lidén or the magical voices of fellow Rune Grammofon artist Jenny Hval and the legendary Dutch sound poet extraordinaire, Jaap Blonk. All join in to explore new musical territory, either together or by being invited to create their own pieces for the album. The result is an open-ended collection of voices and expressions, genres, sounds and non-sounds that define a new extended version of Alog. "On previous albums we have worked slowly, controlling every minute detail of our pieces. With Unemployed, we wanted to explore and exhibit the compositional process, the experiments, the rough sketches and the stream of ideas that goes into it, and not just a series of perfected tracks. Our goal was to free ourselves from standard song-structures and album-formats widespread today." --Alog, 2011