Avmakt — Vardøger

Norwegian sound artist, Andreas Brandal, offers a thrifty 3”CD-R under his Avmakt moniker. This mini-release, entitled Vardøger, came out last year on the Deblia imprint. I’ve written lovingly on Brandal’s work in the past, most notably his Turning Point cassette, which still finds constant rotation on my cassette deck. His penchant for blending eerie synth sounds, junk metal manipulation and degraded loops is what attracts me to much of his output. While I’m familiar with some of his harsher recordings under his Flesh Coffin guise, Avmakt was an unknown to me.

The packaging for each of Vardøger’s 30 edition run is unique. My particular copy is a glued together pocket made from a popsicle box. The project logo and info, xeroxed and glued, adorn the front and back. I love the recycled aesthetic….at least much more so than a shitty xerox foldover.

Vardøger offers 3 tracks of “walls of harsh noise” as opposed to straight up HNW. At a glance, that might seem like a weird distinction, but while Brandal incorporates blown out blocks wall noise, there’s far much more going on than mere void worship. If such a genre as cut-up HNW exists, then this miniature statement may well be part of the vanguard. Each piece on this small disc is a collision of solid blocks of blown out static noise, loops, and junk metal manipulations. Each track is titled by the run time of the piece. The disc starts with “0617.” Loops of junk metal crunch and hollow pipe ringing occupy the first minute before being demolished by explosive wall noise as channelled thrown blown stereo speakers. At times it sounds like vocals are incorporated, though sounding like screams channeled through glass shards. Tracks “0517” and “0725” deliver in similar fashion, both sounding like a myriad of HNW tracks chopped up and sewn together with metal bending and reverberating to fill in the cracks.

Despite it’s short length Vardøger offers another side to Brandal’s soundworks. Admittedly, while I prefer the work Brandal produces under his birth name, this is a nice after dinner treat. Just enough to satiate until another Brandal full-length comes down the pipe.