DNA?AND? & LAMPEKNUSEKONTORET — Hot, Hot, Hot

“We do not come in peace. We do not wish to insult intoxicated fanatics, people from Østfold, northerners, writers of children's books, lawyers, those in the service industry, or teachers.” Now that sounds like a mission statement. And it sort of is, these words forming the basis of a union between two unique Norwegian collectives -  Oslo’s DNA?AND? & Stavanger’s Lampeknusekontoret – each a coalition of  professional musicians and young people with disabilities. They’re no strangers to working together and so last year the two groups joined forces once again to create Hot Hot Hot a maelstrom of sound and noise with pertinent nods to post-punk, ambient and the avant-garde.

Despite being based in two different cities, both collectives are the brainchild of Harald Fetveit - noise music connoisseur and polymath, who for over forty years has been using his profound and extensive visual arts and performative experience to steadily voyage into unexplored and novel realms. With a heavy interest in live music, Fetveit is also an ardent collaborator having worked with Junko Hiroshige, Lucio Capece and Mattin as well as forming one half of duos SKÆVV (with Thomas Oxem) and Sciardac (with Dario Fariello). He’s also the driving force behind Dans for Voksne, playing a key role in the development of experimental music in Oslo.

It is this deep-seated community-oriented spirit that has seen Fetveit routinely step outside the boundaries of what we might call ‘standard’ artistic behaviour. In 2022/3, for example, he played 78 ‘breakfast’ gigs that saw the musician serving up coffee and porridge with a side of noise at Oslo’s Kafe Hæverk. And with this same ethos in mind, Fetveit set up improvisational musical collective DNA?AND? in 2013, featuring four professional musicians including Fetveit (of course) and Argentinian musician and composer Anla Courtis alongside a group of young people with Down Syndrome. The idea was to create music that is both free in terms of its boundaries, is unbound by technical proficiency and which embraces a concerted dismissal of rules to produce a fascinating, uninhibited exploration of sound. Following in Fetveit’s performative shoes, DNA?AND? have played at numerous festivals including Le Guess Who and Norway’s Blow Out, worked with the likes of Hamid Drake and in 2019 released their eponymous debut. And it wasn't long after this album was released that Fetveit and Courtis set up a similar venture in Stavanger – down in the South of the country. They recruited fellow musicians Thore Warland, Signe Time and Kristoffer Riis for a workshop and from there borne a second, similar, collective Lampeknusekontoret.

With the common denominator of Fetveit, it’s little surprise that the two collectives have ended up collaborating over the years and in between separate projects, DNA?AND? & Lampeknusekontoret once again reunited in 2024 to record the improvisational and free flowing musical excursion, Hot, Hot, Hot. With over a year between recording and release this is a piece of work that cannot help but take you over, entangling you in its ever-changing genres which despite the resolution to remain outside the rules includes elements of ambient through to post-punk and no wave while still unequivocally remaining incomparable. As a single composition, this is a fascinating piece of work - unexpected, inspiring, thought-provoking and exciting.