The central figure of Scandinavian noise: a prolific Norwegian artist of hundreds of releases, a great connector across noise, jazz and metal, and a designer and publisher besides.
Lasse Marhaug is the Norwegian noise musician the Bureau files at Tier II as the central figure of the Scandinavian scene and one of the form's great connectors. Born in 1974 in Steigen and now based in Oslo, he has been active since the early 1990s and has appeared as performer or composer on over two hundred releases, a body of work whose sheer scale is matched by an unusual breadth.
Marhaug is primarily a noise artist, but the work drifts freely into improvisation, jazz, rock and extreme metal, and extends into music for theatre, dance, art installation and video. That range sets him apart from the harsh-noise mainstream: he is as likely to be found in a free-jazz setting or scoring a stage piece as building a wall of distortion, and he moves between these worlds without treating any as a departure.
His best-known project is the duo Jazkamer, also spelled Jazzkammer, but that is only one node in a dense web. He has run Origami Replika, plays in Nash Kontroll with Mats Gustafsson and Dror Feiler, and turns up across a very large number of other artists' records. This is the heart of his importance to the archive: Marhaug is a connector, the figure who ties the Scandinavian underground to the noise, improv and metal worlds beyond it, and whose name recurs in the credits of work far beyond his own.
The practice does not stop at sound. Marhaug is also an audio producer, a cover designer, a label owner and a publisher, and the visual and editorial work runs alongside the music rather than beneath it, a sensibility that treats the record, its sleeve and the printed matter around it as a single object. It is of a piece with the way John Wiese works on the American side, and the two have moved in overlapping circles.
The Bureau files Lasse Marhaug at Artists · Tier II as a prolific and central figure of Scandinavian noise, a peer of the international harsh-noise generation including Merzbow and Kevin Drumm, and one of the key connector nodes through which the form's networks actually run.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the postwar · last revised c. the Anthropocene