Lasse Marhaug — Alive

Alive brings together a collection of live recordings from the great Norse Noise Artist  Lasse Marhaug who is know/ respected for his solo work as well as his work with Jazkamer. The recordings here are taken from all over the world stretching back to 1998 and right to up to last year.

The cd comes with a nice full colour bulk booklet giving you visual  snapshots/ travel log of Lasse treks across the world. The 12 tracks on offer go from jagged and oddly rhythmic noise constructions, to electro shock hits and flays. To  punishing sound overloads and bombardments, to droning almost metallic walls of grim sound. The disk last in all at just  near the hour mark- the tracks are relative short  some clocking in at only a few minutes long, while the longest on offer here is just over 11 minutes. Though there are some very rewarding moments here and it’s certainly worth picking up, one feels some of the tracks are rather treading noise water with not enough special or exciting textural going on. My other slight bugbear is it would have been interesting to find exact  origin of each track, as there’s just list of places but not linking them into certain tracks.

A nice package with enough worthwhile moments to make it worth picking up, but it’s certainly not the best work I’ve heard from Marhaug.