Impronoise duo from Stavanger which has been investigating most frequencies since the end of 2004. The have since been toruing and releasing a big amount of albums, not repeating themselves rather peaking them at the topshelves of artists in this genre.
www.myspace.com/bjergaiversen
Reviews
A double-review from Terrascope:
BJERGA/IVERSEN – SMOKE FILLED MIRRORS
(CD-R on Musicyourmindwillloveyou)
BJERGA/IVERSEN – EARTH PIT
(CD-R on Barl Fire)
The Norwegian duo of Sindre Bjerga and Jan Iversen has the kind of exploding nebula of a discography that makes one a little suspicious – you have to wonder if the pipes aren't being clogged with the busywork of a 100 fragmented CD-R labels with more enthusiasm than good judgement. Luckily, this talented experimental duo constantly mutates their thing, as demonstrated on their justly lauded 'Lighthouse Tapes' series, and releases like this pair.
'Smoke-Filled Mirrors' forms part of the duo prolific 2005 work, being recorded and mixed in June least year as part of the 'Hovden Tapes' sessions. One could almost consider it an EP, since it is comprised of a single track eponymous of around 27 minute's duration. It starts will a cloud of electronics, oscillating drones, nether-shortwave voices and associated detritus conjure a dysfunctional machine-shop ambience. Odd, whirs, clanks, rattles and the sounds of broken machines inhabit the sound stage like the ghosts of impending failure that flow through the wires and fluid lines of a badly maintained third-world passenger airliner as the clock of its existence winds down. Warning lights go on and off, caution tones bleep but there is no one around to hear them but us, and we don't care. Signal waves roll onto tape in the black box of this grim industrial symphony, and eventually all the components begin to scream in unison and they figure out their number is up. There is power here, and a certain industrial revolution beauty, but no peace, and all of the possible resolutions obey the third law of thermodynamics. The machine dies, and its ghost moves on.
'Earth Pit' comprises three tracks, the first two recorded at the same sessions as 'Smoke-Filled Mirrors', and the third, an earlier piece, from 2004. 'Shining Light, Shining Bright' is radically different from 'Smoke-Filled Mirrors', though it still contextualises as industrial. Odd snatches of melody cut through a fog-shrouded harbour of sound, high drones and horn sounds creating the nautical mood which regularly pops up as a theme in their work. This engine room is a ship's one, and concepts of entrapment and paranoia are evoked as static drowns out communications and isolation from the rest of the systems involved in one's survival begins to take its psychic toll. Frayed and harrowing at its conclusion, it is a track that makes for unquiet listening. 'The Long Hour of Darkness' retreats into uneasy ambience and asylum behavioural repetitions as the watches of the night pass with agonising slowness. Steady state oscillator patterns and glacial drones sing the chirpy praises of life in the adjacent post code to the Arctic Circle, and that prospective visit to Scandinavia you've been planning gets put on the backburner for reconsideration. 'Rifle Bar' builds from a restrained introduction to a cavernous piece where demons are chained to the walls of a hellish pit full of lava runs and steam vents and the skeletons of unlucky creatures who took the wrong turn somewhere on their journey. Water runs down the walls and howls spiral up and outward, as the eternally trapped struggle to get free of their pit of exile and collect souls on the surface. If they make it, they're coming for your eardrums first.
(Tony Dale)
