Reviews:
(Vital Weekly) On a strictly personal level I can see some relationship between Jaap Blonk and Sindre Bjerga. I saw both of them play concerts on numerous occasions; in recent years hardly from Blonk and lot more from Bjerga. They are both tireless performers. In the case of Bjerga that leads to a lot of releases, taping every concert and finding labels to release (a selection at least) these. Blonk, on the other hand, is someone whose music has a broader range, from solo improvisations with the voice to heavily computer treated studies. His releases might not always (or rather: rarely) be derived from concerts. Still speaking on a personal level, I think both gentlemen deal with a form of sound poetry. In the case of Blonk clearly when he is using his mouth to generate sound, in Bjerga's case a bit more covered up. He uses various means, in which pre-recorded tapes with spoken word (perhaps found sound; maybe not) are played on an old Walkman and Dictaphones, something feeding the sound down a metal pipe to alter the sound. On his 'Hesitation Marks' cassette, he has a live recording from The Hague and Berlin, both within the space of one month in 2017. Both pieces are quite different. The one from The Hague is all about garbling up voice tape, along with contact microphone abuse on rough surfaces, sometimes leaping towards a bit of feedback, which he keeps well under control. In Berlin, the circumstances might have been a bit different as Bjerga stumbled upon feedback, metallic percussion in a non-rhythmical manner and it all sounds mildly more aggressive than what heard on the other side. It culminates in a dirty drone excursion that lasts some eight minutes and it takes his voice poetry to the most abstract level. Sindre Bjerga does what he does best and he does a great job at that. Jaap Blonk is a bit older than Bjerga and has been going since the late 80s with a wide range of musical interests, all of which involve his mouth, producing sounds and words (or vice versa). Sometimes harking back to the early days of Dada, improvising with other musicians, going all computer; anything goes, it seems for him, and this tape is a wild ride along many of these interests. Even when there are no other players listed here, it sounds at times like there are instruments at work here, but everything and that is really everything, went into the computer here and along the lines, various bits and bobs of software are transformed. Maybe live, on the spot? That was at least the impression I got from this cassette. Blonk uses words, voices, gestures of/by the mouth, singing, humming, moaning, sighing or whatever else, and then feeds it into the computer where it slides up, pitches down, stretches, compresses, bend and shaped with granular synthesis. All of these tracks are quite short and to the point, and somehow one fades into the next, even when they all have individual titles. Along with all this voice stuff, there is also the sound of the piano, percussion or strings. I have no idea how these fit into the picture; where do they come from? Are people playing these instruments along with Blonk (but why no mentioning of them on the cover?) or maybe these are midi-controlled instruments that Blonk has full control over as he plays them along with using his voice and controlling the software to process that voice material? Hard to say yet it does make up some fascinating listening. It is very poetic but with these occasional musical instruments also crazy, slightly messed up form of improvised music, that also goes out to the world of electro-acoustic music. It's a one-hour wild ride and it is great to see a new sign of life for mister Blonk; happy as always we this happens! - Frans De Waard
(The Wire) Another screwy assembly by this tireless Norwegian sound artist. Both sides are live concerts, created from fairly small palettes of sonic discharge. The A side sounds like Lawrence Olivier’s devil dentist from Marathon Man interviewing a drunk puppy on a very creaky carousel while tiny animatronic musicians wheeze nearby. The flip is more like a guy trying to gargle hot lava as a way to forget he’s in the middle of a bad subway accident created for a cheap TV series based on The Matrix. As mentioned, Bjerga’s source material seems quite limited, which makes both results all the more dandy. - Byron Coley
(Chattanooga Pulse) Listening to the new cassette Hesitation Marks from the Norwegian artist Sindre Bjerga, this writer imagines some kind of exploratory team from another planet, sifting through the remnants of human civilization on Earth. Some technologically advanced detecting device hums and buzzes as it’s used to scan the rubble, where a damaged Walkman cassette player is found, which miraculously still works, but the playback is severely garbled, so that the spoken message on the tape is rendered incomprehensible. Hesitation Marks documents two live, improvised sets recorded in the Netherlands and Germany in 2017, and Bjerga, a prolific electro-acoustic musician and creator of the Gold Soundz label, doesn’t use conventional instruments, opting to primarily employ a microphone and a portable cassette player, which is manipulated by Bjerga’s fingers to distort the playback speed, warping the output sounds. To the listener, there seems to be no recipe for what makes certain parts more entrancing and intriguing than others. On one hand, the more dense and complex moments offer more to absorb and process, and at times, a firm tug out of a pit of more subtle, less stimulating passages is welcome. Possibly subconsciously, the listener wants cues to know that the musician is paying attention and constantly adjusting and reacting. Generally, a sense of mystery works in favor of this material, where the sound seems to exist in the ether beyond earthly materials or human actions; however, there are small joys that come with recognition—like a pop song being aurally deformed—that draw the listener back to reality. Low fidelity ambient noises, residing within a limited frequency range—whooshes and whirls, with grit and hiss—provide atmospherics while taped voices, like voicemail messages from ghosts, offer an eerie element, which can be both disturbing and slightly comical, particularly because they can’t be understood. - Ernie Paik
(Cassette Gods) “Cassette player drones and kitchen sink psychedelia, sound ghosts hidden deep in the molten magnetic tapes… always aiming for that mind-altering head trip…” Mission statement. Boom. Modus operandi. Boom. Sindre Bjerga follows his muse down a rabbit hole of cassette samples and warped noises, clacking and chipping away at source material and objects until they resemble something completely other than their intended form. “Hesitation Marks” collects two Bjerga live recordings – Any Record, Den Haag, Netherlands, August 12, 2017; XB Liebig, Berlin, Germany, July 8, 2017 – and the sounds echo about the rooms. Alien sonics give way to song fragments, which are chopped and stretched and basically destroyed, as if they were an unfortunate side effect of an extraterrestrial transmission. The mood is “life on other planets,” the kinetic motion unstoppable and weird. “Hesitation Marks” never stops moving, never stops shifting, never stops changing. It’s a slippery beast, best wrangled through headphones. - Ryan
(Sound Projector) Sindre Bjerga from Stavanger is still elbowing aside the competition to become some kind of Crown Prince of mangled gibberish-noise, a station he plans to occupy through his outrageous manipulation of pre-recorded tapes. We’ve heard him doing it to the mass bewilderment of most of the Western world, on past great releases from LF Records and Tutore Burlato, notwithstanding his noisier and more abrasive contributions to the aggressive poots of Star Turbine duo. Here he is with Hesitation Marks (EH?106), a solo cassette which serves up documents of two live performances in Den Haag and Berlin from 2017. A good deal of the listening pleasure on our part is picking out the chunks of familiar sounds in what is otherwise a completely foreign and alien spew of glorpy blipperings and slurped boshderments, where the element of surprise ranks highly and nothing is what it seems. Sindre Bjerga is the exact opposite of electro-techno geniuses who slave behind a computer aiming to achieve a perfect, hard-edged sound; instead, he delights in slippery, organic, rubbery shapes, which change frequently before us, and rarely settle on a stable form. He handles them with buttered fingers. It’s much to his credit that he can sustain this egg-juggling mode for such long periods; most lesser men would be driven mad. Long may he Bjerg his Bjergas. - Ed Pinsent
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