gammelsæter & marhaug: higgs boson

Runhild Gammelsæter and Lasse Marhaug are two Norwegian musicians/sound artists. Both started in the early 1990s music underground and have worked in many constellations with a wide range of collaborators. Despite knowing each other for a long time, Gammelsæter and Marhaug's first collaborative work was the Quantum Entanglement LP in 2014. The project lay dormant until Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson invited them to open for Sunn O))) for a special gig in the St. James Church of Culture in Oslo in 2019. The two gathered for a long series of rehearsals, and after the successful performance, it was clear that it was time to start working on new compositions and recordings. That process initiated in late 2019 and continued to early 2021, before and after the lockdown. The result of this long development to be heard accumulated upon their new album Higgs Boson on Ideologic Organ. Marhaug drew inspiration from concepts informed by the structuralist experimental cinema of Japanese directors Takashi Ito and Toshio Matsumoto, futurist worlds of French comic book artists Philippe Druillet and Jean Moebius Giraud, landscape photography of Fay Godwin, Kåre Kivijärvi, and Tamiko Nishimura, amongst others. It became a metaphysical juxtaposition involving Gammelsaeter's research and lyrical ideas based on several seemingly unrelated principles. A process of association inspired by The Glass Bead Game (1943) by Herman Hesse. The discovery of the Higgs Boson as a confirmation of the physical universe. The work of Ernst Schrödinger on the uncertainty principle. The four forces of physics. The Force. Helplessness under armed forces -- as the war sailors in World War II. The influence of magic as expressed in tarot. Gammelsæter experiments with a boundary involving the thresholds amongst various states of focus and legibility by forensic experimentation with techniques such as exclusive expression of consonants, syllabic repetition, retrograde text vocalizations and multi-lingual layering. Her vocal inspirational sources include Sidsel Endresen, Diamanda Galas, Natacha Atlas, the choral works of Rachmaninov, and the bands Carcass and Grave. Two worlds coming together, making the music special. Mixing hard facts with science fiction helps create a kaleidoscopic cross point between the complex realities of the past and a possible future. Across eight parts, the two artists brought a broad palette of instrumentation and sound on Higgs Boson. Electronic and acoustic, objects and field recordings, and pipe organ define the structures of which the center is Gammelsæter's magnificent voice. She In the mix, Lasse approached the instrumental elements like landscapes, then Runhild's vocals as characters that inhabit those worlds. Often, Gammelsæter multiple characters fused with the landscape. As an album, Higgs Boson is direct and focused, drawing on song structures. Within these tracks are vast strata of sound, an immersive multi-dimensional depth of music.